Legal Design Patterns: New Tools for Analysis and Translations Between Law and Technology

Design patterns, a concept originated in urban architecture and adopted also in software engineering, provides a potential approach also for translations between law and technology. This approach will be examined and elaborated from various viewpoints in this topical collection, for which this introductory article provides an overall framework. Here, we discuss design patterns as documentations of living practice, which embed legal concepts, rules, and thinking and between internal and external perspectives to law. We argue that design patterns provide a structured format for interdisciplinary discussions and enhance problem-solving and self-reflecting capabilities of legal scholarship.