This Fall 2019 independent study tasked two students, Ramzi Bechara (’21) and Ashley Huh (’20), with creating a template contract for Northeastern University’s use with artists as part of NU’s public art program. Their template contract skillfully struck the right balance between the university’s institutional interests and artists’ intellectual property interests, and it became the template used by Northeastern University for contracts between the university and artists.

Eight law students in our Fall Quarter 2018 Laboratory Seminar in Applied Design and Legal Empowerment were partnered with six graduate art students and tasked with developing tools and resources to be used by law students traveling to the southern U.S. border in May 2019 to prepare refugees for credible fear interviews. The student team developed a series of paper tools, including: (1) a booklet for students to record their personal journey through the experience; (2) a script to use as a guide in preparing refugees for credible fear interviews; and (3) a series of graphic cards to help bridge the language gap and provide refugees with a safe means of conveying traumatic experiences. The work was carried forward and tested through a series of independent studies that followed. You can read about the outcomes here.

In our first iteration of the Master Class, one intrepid law student (Kevin Costa, ‘18) served as an expert advisor to four teams of architecture students from Wentworth Institute of Technology working to propose physical interventions for Massachusetts Housing Court at the Brooke Courthouse. Under the direction of our board chair, Marilyn Moedinger, the four teams successfully developed, installed, and tested multiple prototypes that addressed wayfinding and privacy for court users. As a measure of the success of the student work, Housing Court leadership asked to keep the prototypes in place indefinitely. You can read the student experience blog here.

As part of NU’s new Media Advocacy Master’s Degree, we supervised a team of four students for a pop-up lab in the Bronx that focused on developing public awareness campaign ideas for NYC’s Right to Counsel Coalition. Two deliverables emerged from this work: a drum/bucket filled with promotional magnets, stickers, and information, and academic support for RTCNYC’s study on the reasons why people were not availing themselves of the new right.

Our eviction defense learning game — part of our RePresent suite of games — was created by Eduardo Gonzalez (’16), who began building the game while on co-op with the NuLawLab in early 2016. We hired him after graduation on a contract basis to complete the design and coding of the game. Eduardo went on to make a name for himself in the rapidly growing A2J tech space.

Summer Quarter 2016 seminar students were posed the question, “How might we reimagine the external website of the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division (DOJ/CRD) to be more responsive to the needs of people who believed their civil rights were being violated?” Their solution was an overhaul of key aspects of the website, including a new approach to highlighted case files, an interactive timeline detailing the path of a complaint at DOJ/CRD, and a guided online interview that allowed users to determine whether they had a valid complaint.

Thanks to the Givelber Lecture series, we were able to bring legal design pioneer and Lab collaborator Margaret Hagan to NUSL for a two-week intensive with students in 2016. She guided students through a user-centered design approach, combined with agile development, to address the challenges of Housing Court for self-represented litigants. The class involved fieldwork at the courts, identifying key fail points and stakeholder frustrations through observation and interviews, and brainstorming and testing new solutions. Her generosity of time and talent helped inform the evolution of our Lab Seminar.

Seven law students in our Summer Quarter 2019 Laboratory Seminar in Applied Design and Legal Empowerment were tasked with working alongside local artist and Tufts/SMFA faculty member Anthony Romero and the Northeastern University Archives & Special Collections to answer the question, “What might we learn from the rich history of successful East Boston activism that could be deployed to empower current residents to assert their legal rights in proactive defense against displacement by redevelopment?” The student team designed a suite of materials that included a promotional banner, a “know-your-rights” zine, and a re-envisioned edition of the East Boston Community News, all of which were incorporated into Romero’s contributions to the ICA’s exhibit on migration through the lens of contemporary art.