Interview with the Lead of the Leuphana LawLab: Rojda Tosun

Rethinking Law: How the Leuphana Law Lab is Bringing Legal Design into Legal Education.

When you study law, you’re taught early on that the law is something fixed. Laws are interpreted, placed in their historical context, and reduced to their teleological essence. You follow familiar steps that have remained unchanged for decades. But what happens when you eventually realize that this understanding of the law isn’t enough? What if you sense that the world is more complex than a report style and that law could be more than just application?

That’s exactly where the story of the lead of the Leuphana Law Lab begins. When we spoke with her, she openly shared how, even as a student, she felt that something was missing. Legal thinking was fascinating, but at the same time frustrating. She enjoyed using the law to better understand the world. And yet she constantly asked herself: How does law actually come about? How does it function in society? And can you really make a difference with it?

These questions became the guiding thread of her professional development.

From a Traditional Legal Education to the Idea of Shaping the Law

Rojda Tosun completed a traditional law degree, which took five to five and a half years to reach the first exam. It involved a lot of legal interpretation, a lot of theory, and little room for creativity or social issues. She describes this time as intellectually enriching but emotionally unfulfilling. The standard methods left little room to think beyond the boundaries of the text. Topics such as legal theory or the social impact of law were scarcely addressed, even though that was precisely where her curiosity lay.

Looking back, it becomes clear that she was already practicing legal design much earlier, without calling it that. In 2010, she founded a youth organization that worked with immigrant communities and sought to translate their needs into political processes. At the time, she wasn’t thinking about concepts like legal design; she simply wanted to create spaces where people could be heard. Today, she recognizes this as her first step toward legal design: making visible perspectives that would otherwise be overlooked.

Her Late Encounter with the Term “Legal Design”

She didn’t come across the term itself until surprisingly late. She was in the middle of her second state exam, exhausted from exam preparation, and at the same time searching for a different approach to the law. While researching “innovative law,” she first came across legal tech and then, gradually, legal design. What initially seemed like just another trend turned out to be the missing piece of the puzzle: the connection between law, design, and social impact.

This became truly tangible when she had the opportunity to collaborate on a project run directly under the patronage of the then-Chancellor of Germany. The project focused on how laws can be developed in an interdisciplinary, user-oriented, and experimental manner. She was the only lawyer on the team and suddenly realized how important legal expertise is when it’s used not just for interpretation, but for design. This experience confirmed for her that the law can be changed if one is brave enough to understand it as a process.

Another defining moment followed when she got to know international legal design communities as part of a fellowship. She was particularly inspired by the work of Jules Sievert from Boston, who combines art, law, and social transformation. There, she understood just how far one can think once one dares to look beyond the legal discipline.

What Legal Design means to her

If you ask her today how she would describe Legal Design, she doesn’t start with technical methods or tools. For her, Legal Design is above all an invitation to open up the law to other perspectives, other disciplines, and other realities of life. The law is not merely applied, but developed collaboratively. It becomes more accessible, understandable, and just when those affected by it are included.

For her, Legal Design means viewing the law not as a fixed entity, but as a living system that is in constant dialogue with society. It requires taking seriously the complexity underlying every law and every procedure. You don’t start with the solution—you start with the problem. One asks: For whom should the law work? Where is it failing today? What would need to happen so that people do not get bogged down by forms, procedures, or structures before they can even access their entitlements?

This becomes particularly clear when looking at digital administrative processes. A BAföG (federal student financial aid in Germany) application could leave substantive rules unchanged and still become more equitable if data were intelligently linked and people did not have to gather everything themselves. The law does not change in its text, but in its actual accessibility. For her, this is precisely what transformative legal design is all about.

Law is not neutral—and that is precisely where its potential lies

One idea that keeps coming up is her conviction that law is not neutral. It is written by people who bring their own assumptions, blind spots, and limitations to the table. The scope of norms, application procedures, hurdles, and wording often arise from routines, not from thoughtful decisions.

For her, it is crucial to start precisely there. If the law is not neutral, then it can also be shaped. Then we can consciously decide which voices are missing, which experiences should be taken into account, and what procedures must look like so that the law actually works.

She describes exercises such as the “Society Simulation Game,” in which participants—without knowing the roles of others—must decide who occupies which position in a room. For female politicians and lawyers experiencing such methods for the first time, this often leads to an “aha” moment. They realize how many assumptions they make about other people and how much these assumptions shape their legal practice.

For her, such insights are at the heart of Legal Design.

The Leuphana Law Lab as a Space for Experimenting with the Law of the Future

These experiences gave rise to the Leuphana Law Lab—a place where students from various disciplines explore together how law can be used as a lever for sustainable transformation. At first, the goal seemed clear: law should be used to drive sustainable change. But it quickly became clear just how differently sustainability can be understood and how multifaceted these issues are.

Instead of a narrow definition, the team therefore opted for an open approach. In the Law Lab, “legal design” is first taught as a methodology. Students are encouraged to discover for themselves where they want to make an impact—whether in the text of the law, in legal procedures, in access to justice, in communication, in social dialogue, or in institutional structures. This creates a space where law is not only learned but also put to the test. Students are allowed to experiment, fail, rethink, test methods, and find their role in shaping the law.

Each semester, this gives rise to projects that are not merely academic exercises but often have a real-world impact. At the same time, the Law Lab demonstrates that legal education can be more than just the transfer of knowledge. It can be a personal “awakening”—a moment when one realizes just how much creative power lies within the law.

Where is this journey headed?

When she looks to the future, she hopes that Legal Design in Germany will not remain merely an add-on, but will be recognized as an integral part of legal education. There are already early signs of this. External partners are showing interest, and the Law Lab itself is gaining increasing visibility.

In the long term, she dreams of seeing an independent field develop—one supported by many people, not just a few pioneers. A network of legal, artistic, political, and social voices working together to make the law more just, accessible, and effective.

A blog that starts right here

With this blog, we want to pick up right where we left off. We want to provide insights into the world of legal design and transformative law-making, share examples, amplify voices, showcase projects, and show students that the law can be more than what they’ve known so far.

There are countless stories, methods, challenges, and moments that demonstrate that the law can be shaped. And we want to tell them here.

Welcome to the first post.

Welcome to the experimental space.

Welcome to a legal future that we can shape together.

Interview conducted by: Dana Vidgofa