‘Unlimiting’ Legal Conceptualisation in Designerly Ways

In Law Unlimited (2017), Margaret Davies urges theorists to adopt ‘a more open, dynamic and responsive understanding of law’—one which can better accommodate the multiplicities and indeterminacies of legal thinking and practice, and their entanglement with the wider human and more-than-human worlds. She argues that to unlimit law in this way we must approach theorisation less as a deterministic, formalistic process which aspires to conceptual coherence, more as an experimental process which aspires to conceptual co-existence. This paper explores how techniques and knowledge from design-based disciplines might enhance our ability to make such a shift. It highlights the designerly ways of emphasising practical-critical-imaginative mindsets, experimental processes, and visual and material communication strategies; and illustrates how they might contribute to unlimiting legal conceptualisation with reference to specific examples. Along the way it surfaces pragmatism as a latent, hitherto unremarked, point of contact between legal and design theory.