The JSW Centre for the Future of Law at NLSIU is organising a workshop titled ‘Designing (for & with) Justice: AI, Judicial Digitisation, and the Rule of Law in India’ with Dr. Akanksha Bisoyi, post-doctoral researcher at the Professorship of Law, Innovation and Legal Design, Technical University of Munich.

• Day & Date: Friday, 04 September 2026
• Time: 4:00 to 5:15 PM
• Mode: Online

The workshop is open to the public. Kindly register here.

Abstract

Designing (for & with) Justice: AI, Judicial Digitisation, and the Rule of Law in India

Judicial technologies, including AI, built to optimise efficiency, whether for case management, litigant communication, or decision support, encode a particular vision of justice, and with it a gap between the formal availability of courts and substantive access to them. The paper proposes designing (for & with) justice: critical making as both a methodological framework and an analytical lens for examining that gap across India’s judicial digitisation. It asks how such technologies might be designed and evaluated so that gains in institutional efficiency do not come at the cost of the rule of law values.

Critical making, coined by Ratto (2009), combines critical thinking with hands-on material engagements with technologies to surface the assumptions and social values embedded in technological design. It aligns with Nissenbaum’s ‘values in design’ and Costanza-Chock’s ‘design justice’. Unlike conventional user-centred design, which defaults to imagined ‘dominant’ users resembling the designer, thereby reproducing structural exclusions, critical making places affected communities within iterative design, where material choices pose questions rather than merely solving problems. Drawing on Loveless’s ‘research-creation’, the framework privileges
deliberate slowness and community accountability over optimisation logics.

Applied to judicial digitisation initiatives across India, the paper aspires to develop a framework to examine how technological artefacts reconfigure participation, reshape access to justice, and affect the institutional conditions necessary for the rule of law. It evaluates technologies by situating them within their institutional and socio-political setting, identifying affected stakeholders, surfacing embedded assumptions, and assessing outcomes against criteria for access to justice, equitable participation, and the integrity of the rule of law.

The paper contributes a methodology for integrating critical making into legal design research and develops equitable design criteria and affordances for the development of court technology. It offers a framework for community participation in justice system design, and evidence to help policymakers and civic-tech organisations navigate the tension between institutional efficiency and substantive access to justice.

Work in progress and limitations – This work is at an early stage. Analysis of judicial technologies and stakeholder interviews is ongoing, and the consolidated design framework will be refined through further fieldwork. The paper, therefore, presents a methodological intervention. Discussion is invited on the method and on the criteria proposed for evaluating the rule of law compatibility.

Acknowledgement – This research forms part of the ‘Visions of Justice Space’ project on judicial digitisation, participatory research, and the rule of law in India. The project is funded by the Friedrich Schiedel Fellowship for Technology in Society, TUM Think Tank, Munich, Germany.