This post focuses on a brilliant, inspiring, and original law teaching practice used by Professor Roberto Corrada of the University of Denver Sturm School of Law. Professor Corrada structures entire courses as “whole-class simulations.” Many of us, of course, use simulations in our teaching; we have students act in role as lawyers and argue hypotheticals, question witnesses, create fact investigation plans, draft contract provisions, etc. What distinguishes Corrada’s approach is that he teaches entire doctrinal courses such as Labor Law and Administrative Law through a single, complex, indeterminate, semester-long simulation with students acting in role throughout the entire course. You may want to sit down before reading about what Professor Corrada does in these courses; it is that distinctive.
In Labor Law, he (quite reasonably) designates his students as labor and himself as management. He positions his syllabus as a possibility for collective bargaining, but he makes it clear that students have to be certified as a union to bargain regarding the terms of the class as documented in the syllabus, and he has arranged for a friend with the Denver office of the National Labor Relations Board to certify the students as the bargaining unit for the class, but, of course, only if the students learn and comply with the relevant requirements. He even builds in management violations of labor law that the students have to challenge with the NLRB. For example, when the students are planning for their collective bargaining with him, he might ask if his research assistant can sit in on their deliberations, which would be a labor law violation. Once the students’ union has been certified, he bargains as to the terms he is willing to negotiate, e.g., cold calls vs. warm calls, the weight of various assessments, the various teaching methods he will use over the course of the semester and those that students might ask for but which he is unwilling to concede, e.g., “A” grades for everyone, no class preparation expectations, no attendance expectations.
Professor Corrada both details his whole-course simulation approach to teaching administrative law and justifies his choices by reference to well-established teaching principles and teaching and learning theory in this Journal of Legal Education article. In this class, as Professor Corrada explains in his article,
The Jurassic Park administrative law class is a simulation requiring students to learn administrative law while at the same time deploying what they’ve learned to collectively write a statute regulating the release of dinosaur DNA into the biosphere. The novel Jurassic Park serves as a fact foundation for the class. Students are charged with deciding how to regulate the area, and then writing a law that deals with (and presumably fixes) the problems arising in the novel. Fifty percent of the class grade is for work on the statute. Some of that fifty percent is for the group product and the other part is for individual student work on the project. The other fifty percent of the class grade is traditional doctrinal class credit for class participation (which can include contributions on the discussion board) and for performance on an examination given toward the end of the class or as a final examination.
Roberto Corrada, Teaching a Hybrid Administrative Law Simulation Class Using Jurassic Park, 71 J. Legal Ed. 282, 283 (2022). The full article is worth the read.
The approach could be applied to other courses. For example, I would be thrilled to hear from civil procedure or remedies profs who have taught those courses based a single, complex case file. If you have other ideas, please feel free to email me at mschwartz@pacific.edu. I would love to do a follow-post based on your ideas.
