by Professors Amanda Perry-Kessaris and Elen Stokes
How might we legal scholars develop our capability to work with legal futures? Why ought we to try? These questions lay at the heart of a one-day capacity-building Workshop held at the University of Bristol in July 2024, led by Elen Stokes and Amanda Perry-Kessaris.
We use the term ‘legal futures’ to refer to relationships that reach between the here-and-now and the yet-to-come, and in which legal thinking and practice might play a role.
Drawing on futures expertise
The workshop was guided by our sense of futures as an inherently interdisciplinary space. So we invited University of Bristol experts Vivienne Kuh and Rebecca Coleman to collaborate with us (Image 1).
Vivienne introduced us to key concepts from Futures Studies, such as ‘foresight’, ‘forecast’, ‘anticipation’, then placed them in broader contexts of her specialist area: Responsible Innovation. She also introduced us to a novel methodology, narrative futuring, that supports collective imagination as a means of reflecting on contemporary practice and values.
Rebecca introduced us to the concept of ‘everyday futures’ entry point for exploring how futures emerge from and shape social life. She drew on examples from her own work, including the analysis of Mass Observation primary qualitative data on everyday temporal experiences in the Covid-19 pandemic.
Drawing on design-based methods
The workshop was also guided by insights from a wider investigation into the potential of design-based methods to enhance all aspects of legal research. This influence was evident in the general emphasis we placed on experimentation, and on making ideas visible and tangible; and well as in our use of the ‘briefs’—detailed tasks, incrementally revealed, to be completed by participants—in order to focus attention and generate action.
Brief 1: The Future in Legal Studies was issued before the event, and was embedded in the call for participation. Faculty and post-graduate research students at the University of Bristol Law School were invited to secure a place at the workshop by offering a brief response to the question: What roles does and/or might the future play in your field of study? The aim of the brief was to spark curiosity, to entice participation, and to facilitate initial reflections by the futures-curious on their own knowledge and experience around legal futures.
Brief 2: The Thing from the Future, introduced by Vivienne Kuh, centred on a fast-paced ‘imagination game that challenges players to collaboratively and competitively describe objects from a range of alternative futures’ that was created by Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson at Situation Lab (Images 2 and 3).
Brief 3: Making legal futures tangible was designed to get participants to take a series of incremental steps towards materialising some of their thinking around legal futures in the form of a clay model, and in this way to make that thinking more, or differently, available to themselves and others. First, they were invited to work collaboratively to identify a range of legal phenomena that might be future-relevant. Here we distributed a set of keywords which we had extracted from the responses given by participants to Brief 1 to help get the conversation started (Title Image). Then they were invited to choose one future-relevant phenomenon, to make a clay model of it, to perform that model to themselves and to others, and then to exhibit the models in relation to each other (Images 4 and 5).
Brief 4: Reflection invited participants to feedback on the Workshop. The aims of the workshop were to offer futures-curious legal scholars the opportunity to (a) interact with non-legal scholars who have experience of working with futures; (b) engage in hands-on experimentation around futures; and (c) begin to develop a sense of scholarly community around legal futures. Participant feedback suggests that all of these aims were met to some degree.
Most importantly, all those who provided feedback on the event indicated that they would be interested to know more about, and engage in further activities around, the topic of legal futures. So we are currently working on an article and making plans for future events.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Vivienne Kuh and Rebecca Coleman, and for funding from the Law School’s Research and Impact Committee.