The Form of Forms: Everyday Enablers of Access to Justice

Abstract

Forms are vehicles that register the everyday. A bureaucratic form starts a dialogue between an individual and the State in a particular area of public administration. The visual design of bureaucratic forms shapes what is registered and how personal identity is documented in the eyes of the State. This article is situated in the field of administrative justice and argues that we must increase the scope for personal narrative in the design of bureaucratic forms. Meers notes that there has been no sustained research into application forms despite the importance of forms in the administration of the welfare state. By drawing on sociological scholarship on registration and narrative together with socio-legal scholarship on design, the ideas explored offers a novel and interdisciplinary approach to scholarship on the form of forms.

Registering the Everyday: Documents, Bureaucracy, and the Socio-Legal

“…The discussion on how registration is conceptualised as a technology of governance continues as Aisling Ryan explores, to use her term, 'the form of forms' (Ryan, 2023). As she engages with socio-legal design-based theory, Ryan asks whether bureaucratic forms can ever be reframed into tools for social justiceand, if so, what this might look like through design-based praxis.…”

“…Whilst states may conceive registration as a technology of regulation orientated towards extracting data and creating enduring and stable facts from which to govern, does this 'bureaucratic logic' (Trabsky, 2022) follow through into the everyday? Is there space to disrupt the 'form of forms' (Ryan, 2023) or to reveal the inherently instrumental and fragmented nature of the register itself (Jacob and Saksena, 2023)?…”

“…Whilst the papers draw on a range of methods across socio-legal inquiry, design theory, and legal history, each of the papers explore the state's perspective on registration. The papers, as a collective, provide insights into how registration is regarded by state actors: as an ocular tool of regulation (Tessaro, 2023 , a malleable instrument to manage crises (Jacob and Saksena, 2023), and in relation to the form, they invite us to explore what registration and legal documents might need to become, if they are to have any role in advancing social justice (Ryan, 2023). What roles can be played by narrative, flexibility, and sensitivity to the relationship between the material everyday and the abstraction compelled by the register?…”