Blog #5: Law Meets Design
We have spent the past three classes digging into two important cases, Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) and Jones v. Alfred Mayer Co. (1968). Lots to cover in this post:
The text of these cases (like all Supreme Court decisions) are freely accessible online through a number of different sites. We link to them under Class 5 on our syllabus, using a site called Justia. On one level, it is remarkable to have free and open access so readily available; even a generation ago finding the text of Supreme Court decisions would have been far more difficult. But these online formats are often clunky and intimidating. There is a lot of text, a lot of concepts, and not much guidance along the way.
We encourage you to peruse these two cases and try to make sense of them. If you are not a lawyer, you may find the reasoning difficult to follow, but attempting to read for understanding will be worth experiencing as part of this course. You might try and determine two different questions for each of the two cases: (1) what is the primary legal issue in this case?; and (2) What is this case about? Think, too, how these two questions relate to one another.
In the next post, we’ll introduce some visual thinking and design research methods that we used to unpack these cases with our students.
In the meantime, feel free to post a comment sharing something about your experience reading these cases.