The NJ Legal Design Lab facilitates creative, collaborative, and community-driven approaches to housing justice problems in New Jersey. By co-creating with our neighbors, we seek to dismantle unjust systems and secure housing for all.
As part of the Housing Justice Project, we work closely with our colleagues to complement traditional legal advocacy with legal design methods. Legal design is a creative approach to finding, exploring, and solving legal problems. Our existing systems were designed, and we can use design frameworks to deconstruct and dream beyond them. Together, we can design all kinds of things—and things that aren’t really “things” at all. We can design tools to share information, like pamphlets and websites. We can design services, like processes for connecting people to legal help. We can design ways of interacting with each other and making collective decisions.
To ground our work in the needs of local movements and communities, the Lab strives to employ participatory design processes. In participatory design—also called co-design—people impacted by a problem share decision-making power throughout the design process, from defining the problem to creating and testing solutions.
Education within and beyond the law school classroom is a key component of the Lab's work. In the Housing Justice and Legal Design Clinic, law students work alongside local tenants, organizers, and other advocates to explore problems of housing injustice and co-design solutions that build tenant power. Most recently, Legal Design Clinic students collaborated with tenant leaders in Montclair, co-creating tools to support the tenants’ efforts to start a tenant association in their building.
Design democratically. We design with our neighbors, not for them. We value dignity, agency, and shared decision-making. Participatory design processes don’t just generate better solutions. They empower us individually and collectively.
Design cooperatively. We situate our work within a broader ecosystem of social change efforts. We design in solidarity with movements in New Jersey and beyond. We combine law and design, pedagogy and action, critique and creativity. We share knowledge to build power in our classrooms and our communities.
Design critically. We attack the root causes of social injustice. We reject the notion that our existing systems and structures are inevitable. We embrace radical dreaming as a portal to more just worlds.
The Lab was founded by clinical professor Abdul Rehman Khan in 2022 as part of the Housing Justice Project at Seton Hall’s Center for Social Justice. We seek collaboration with tenants, people experiencing housing insecurity, organizers, advocates, policymakers, students, educators, researchers, service providers, community organizations, designers, artists, coders—you!
Abdul Rehman Khan
Founder
Assistant Clinical Professor
[email protected]
Hallie Jay Pope
Director
[email protected]
Kayla Strube
Project Coordinator
[email protected]
Community Co-Design Committee
The Community Co-Design Committee is a group of creative New Jerseyans with a wide range of personal and professional experiences with housing injustice. Co-Designers work closely with each other, Lab staff, and Seton Hall students to shape the Lab’s mission, values, priorities, and strategies.
Readings and Resources
The Lab aims to build and share knowledge about liberatory legal design theory, methods, and pedagogy. Below is a list of readings and resources we have either created ourselves or relied upon in our work. We will update this list as often as possible. If you have a recommendation, please email us.
-Design Justice by Sasha Constanza-Chock
-Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making by Sam Kaner
-Convivial Toolbox by Liz Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers
-The Socio-Legal Lab by Siddharth Peter de Souza and Lisa Hahn
-Cool Tools for Hot Topics by Ron Kraybill
-Teaching to Transgress by Bell Hooks
-Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
-Freedom Dreams by Robin D.G. Kelley
-Syllabus by Lynda Barry
-Sharing Knowledge, Shifting Power by Hallie Jay Pope & Ashley Treni
-Design in Legal Education by Emily Allbon and Amanda Perry-Kessaris (eds.)
-Law by Design by Margaret Hagan
-Liberatory Legal Design & Radical Imagination by Hallie Jay Pope
-Designs for the Pluriverse by Arturo Escobar
We would love to hear from you! If you would like to stay informed about the Lab’s work, please fill out this short form.
Getting Legal Help
If you are a tenant or member of a tenant organization seeking legal assistance on a housing matter, or if you or your organization are interested in community education on housing topics, please contact the Center for Social Justice at 973-642-8700 or [email protected].
