Jurist #2: Making Scholarship Accessible and Hip

The annual Jurist publication flips traditional academic publication on its head to provide a peek into legal scholarship that is accessible, engaging and which pushes the limits of what can be done with design in academia.

Cover image of Jurist #2 showing a professor explaining a concepr during class.
The contents page of Jurist showing two columns, one for scholarly editorial articles and another for the profiles of faculty and alumni.
A page from Jurist with an op-ed article by a professor. There is a short biography and photograph of the professor in the bottom right corner.
A page from Jurist with an article about an event: SCOTUS in Focus, held at the school and showing a photograph of three professors at the event during their panel discussion.
Another page from the SCOTUS in Focus article, this time with an infographic illustrating the Supreme Court decisions under discussion as well as a few photographs of the panel discussion and moderator at the event.
A double page spread from Jurist with an article about the competition teams with photography showing the dompetitions director as well as successful teams and their coaches.
The back page of jurist showing a advert for a Law Symposium scheduled for later in the year at the school.
  • CLIENT:

    Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law

  • PROJECT:

    Jurist #2: Novelty Comes to Academic Publication Design

Jurist was a complete undoing of traditional academic publications by removing all the gatekeeping.

First to go was the language. Academic scholarship is drowning in operationalized terminology and jargon, hardly accessible to the layperson. For this project, we had professors take their original scholarly articles and create op-ed-style pieces from them, no more than 1,000 words. No citation list, no intricate scholarly argument interwoven with references and nods to other scholars, just the bare bones of what they were thinking when they set out to write the piece–raw opinion, but backed up with good thinking.

The design of Jurist riffs on newspaper design, specifically the weekly fan newspapers I used to voraciously consume as a kid, sadly, all defunct titles now, rags like New Musical Express (NME) and Melody Maker. These titles were always printed on grubby newsprint; so, in an effort to retain some of the polish of the academy, I went with a digital print onto a clean white broadsheet selected and sized for me by my printer. Ta-da.

The result is the kind of thing a professor might have absent-mindedly stashed under their arm as they walk into class, or at a conference like the annual Association of American Law Schools. The result is awesome brand placement, an accessible reading of current scholarship and a great insight into the academic life of the school, with even a spot to promote a symposium on the back page (this year’s went to the Entertainment and Sports Law Symposium).

The only element of redesign this year was to change up the page numbers, making them massive and placing them centrally on opposing margins where your thumbs would normally go, mashing you directly into the experience of the paper.

Check out the Spring 2026 edition here.