Later this month I will be submitting my final project proposal and, having identified my research area – “Law as Art” I need to outline the territory I am going to explore and suggest a path through.  What are my aims? What specifically am I intending to do?

It is as a citizen first that I find this area of research immediately arresting – in the U.K., we are all subject to the rule of law, but what do we actually know about how laws are made?

Gulf between Citizen and Law

Every week, central government introduces new legislation regulating all aspects of our lives and we, as citizens, are in effect the end-users: consumers of law – What understanding do we have about the process from which law emerges?
Even the most commonplace of legal documentation, such as a Tenancy Agreement, is totally impenetrable for a majority of people – littered with seemingly contradictory technical terminology.  Legal documentation actually seems like an irrelevence – ‘non-working documents’ – which are completely unneeded until exactly when it is too late – when we come into contact with the law through abuse, accident and tragedy.  In a confused ‘car crash’ scenario we employ specialists to perform an autopsy on our paperwork.

2694 Humorists tell us there is no act of our lives which can be performed without breaking through some one of the many meshes of the law by which our rights are so carefully guarded; and those learned in the law, when they give advice without the usual fee, and in the confidence of friendship, generally say, ‘Pay, pay anything rather than go to law;’

Chapter on Legal Memoranda: Mrs Beeton’s Household Management, first published 1861.

There seems to be an insurmountable gulf between citizens and the specialised processes of law making and our legal architecture – the framework of rules which fences and underpins our culture.

I would like to investigate and suggest new ways for citizens to become engaged with law and ultimately to be involved in the formulation and enactment of law, in a real and creative sense.