Students in 'oppressive' law class learn to negotiate - fast

"For me, it's terrific," he says. "It makes class fun and teaches students about the forms they need to file and forces them to come up with documents on their own. It teaches them both about collective action and the law."

Held agrees now that the class was fun, even though it involved much more research and work than a normal law class. That extra effort had practical and gratifying results, he points out: The grading curve was negotiated up to a more lenient level.

"My friends and I studied harder for that class because of fear of getting fired each day," Held says. "You didn't want to let your friends down in class.... It was so different from any other law school class ... not just learning the law from books."

Not everyone is persuaded that this method works, though.

Alan Hyde, a law professor at Rutgers University School of Law in Newark, N.J., has used some role-playing techniques. But only for individual classes. He's not about to start a semester-long effort.

"Look, I'm sure the [teaching] system [in law school] is broken," he says. "I just wonder if a simulation like that is teaching them all they need to know."

That is exactly what Roberto Corrada is trying to find out.

With a Carnegie Foundation grant, the professor at the University of Denver's College of Law is conducting a study to see just how much this sort of interactive teaching and simulation helps students learn the law.

His approach was more subtle than Dau-Schmidt's, but his dictatorial ways were still enough to get his labor-law students fed up last spring. They, too, formed a union.

Professor Corrada's students were so worked up, they spent hours after class compiling statistics and arguments so compelling that he could not ignore their demand for a more lenient grading curve.

"One of my goals is to get students to improve their critical-thinking skills," Corrada says. "That isn't necessarily accomplished in a pure lecture format, when they write it down and regurgitate it on a test. For me, they have to create the thing they're learning, work with the subject matter itself to achieve goals - which is what they would do as an attorney."

It seems to be working. Bowen, in her final year of law school, says Corrada's class was a high point. "Law school tends to be a real arbitrary process," Bowen says. "Professors dictate everything. This gave us an unusual opportunity to actually have some say over the way the class was conducted."

And the method has gotten some students hooked on labor law. At Indiana, for instance, Held had no interest in the career field before taking Dau-Schmidt's class. Now, he has sent his resume to the National Labor Relations Board.

E-mail claytonm@csps.com.

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