UMass Law UMass Law: Owens Publishes “The Court of Student Excuses” in a Teaching Resources & Innovation Library

Professor Owens recently published a discussion-based activity she developed to help students learn more about the function and concepts of law and society. The exercise encourages students to build a new ‘court’ in the classroom which will adjudicate the excuses that students communicate to instructors.

Professor Owens recently published a discussion-based activity she developed to help students learn more about the function and concepts of law and society. The exercise encourages students to build a new ‘court’ in the classroom which will adjudicate the excuses that students communicate to instructors.  Once the court is built, and students have decided on the basic rules and principles of the court, the students test the court through a number of hypothetical cases. Drawing on rich, tacit student knowledge, this in-class, discussion-based activity allows students to apply concepts involving structural inequality, personal responsibility and agency, and the function of the judicial system.   It also allows students to engage with the difficulty of translating various individual needs and concerns into broad rules and creating just institutions and for an exploration of the malleability of rules, the role of relative power, context and choice, and the possibility of unequal burdens of access and consequence.

The exercise was published in the peer-reviewed Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology (TRAILS), a project of the American Sociological Association. TRAILS uses two-stage peer-reviewed submission criteria to select and publish effective pedagogical content. The exercise may be viewed here.