street law and arbetman and edward l. o'brien

One of the students in my Sales Law class explained that she would be missing class on a certain day because she was in charge of the local "Street Law" program. I excused her absence and stated my support for what she was trying to do. The next thing I know she lent me a copy of the text they used, appropriately called Street Law (6th Ed., though 7th Ed. has just come out). I spent a while this evening perusing the book and learning about the "movement" through their web page. This brief essay summarizes some of my thoughts.

Origins and Motivation

The idea of street law, where high school students are taught, usually as an elective, the principles of "practical law" or law as it impinges their life, originated in the early 1970s at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC. The two gurus of the movement, Lee Arbetman and Edward O'Brien, are still at it 30 years later, with the 7th edition of the texbook (about 680 pages including appendices) testifying to the vigor of the idea. The original goal of the class, which still motivates the effort, is to acquaint students with the practical workings of law as it is likely to be most interesting to them or most likely to meet them--in the form of courts, laws, lawyers, consumer laws and constitutional law. A figure cited on the StreetLaw.org web page claims that students have a higher degree of satisfaction with social studies when they study Street Law than when they study a traditional social studies topic. All of this should be good news, then, to those in the movement.

The Text

My first reaction to the wealth of topics covered in the 44 chapters of the text was to be overjoyed. Terminology of law appeared in bold print; cases or problems for discussion appear every two or three pages; colorful pictures grace the whole. A person familiar with law can tell that many of the problems are derived from the "sexier" or more visible issues in American law today. For example, the text has a short section on "The Golfer and His Golf Cart," in which the story of Casey Martin is briefly told, the Americans with Disabilities Act is even more briefly mentioned and several other problems relating to disability discrimination are presented. The focus of the text seems to be to get the students to engage in vigorous discussions of the topic of the day, though they really are not given much legal information to go on in arguing their case.

A Further Look

This last observation about the Casey Martin case made me a little uneasy, and so I decided to look closely at something I knew a bit about--since I teach the subject at a law school. I turned to their six page chapter on Warranty Law (chapter 23). Then, when reading the material on Warranty Law, it dawned on me. The material presented is just a simplified version of 2-313 to 2-316 of the Uniform Commercial Code, coupled by a few highlights of the federal Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act from the 1970s. Now, there is nothing wrong with presenting warranty law to students in a Street Law class, but it seemed that the chapter, which might have been written by a law student, was really driven primarily by the text (Article 2 of the UCC) rather than by life. That is, the philosophy of the "Street Law" program is to make law "relevant" to students. But the method the authors seem to use in doing this is to pick topics from law that are close to the lives of students but then to present them in a mini-legal-education way. It is as if the text, then, is a simplified law school text, with contemporary illustrations thrown in to make the issue "relevant."

So, here was the dilemma I faced as I read the chapter on Warranties and thought about the goals of Street Law. On the one hand, the material was accurate and presented in a simplified form, without the citations to the codes and statutes that encumber legal writing. Yet, on the other hand, the way material is presented is very much a "top down" method--start with the authority or text, and then move to the problems. But because they text tries to "cover" about 44 chapters (topics), there really isn't time to do more than introduce the leading legal buzz words ("clear and present danger," "prior restraint," etc.) and then rush on to problems that the students can discuss. As a result, it seems to me that the text captures the worst of both worlds--it tries to introduce terms of significant legal meaning without properly contextualizing them and it covers so many topics that the book is forced to become a sort of catalogue of terms or legal principles without a simple way of guiding the student into a problem in any depth. The issue, as it always seems to be, is one of "coverage"--i.e., a book such as this needs to "cover" a wide variety of materials in order to justify its name. The problem is that no depth learning is possible.

A Different Method?

I think it is a safe bet that I will never author a "Street Law" textbook, so someone might say that it is the better part of wisdom for me to restrain my criticism. I think, however, that if I were teaching such a course and writing such a book, I would make it a more inductive study. Rather than beginning with "top down" principles, I would present a lot of FAQs, simple problems, or a very few in depth case studies that have multiple dimensions to them. In addition, I would use these few case studies or problems as the occasion to introduce students to the text of the constitution, the statute books of the state in which they live, the administrative regulations (if necessary) or the courts in which cases are presented. That is, I would begin with a divorce or a student free speech issue (clothing, possibly) or a housing issue or a consumer purchase issue (buying a car, used or new) and then build law into the transaction as it went along. I would not worry so much about coverage--the older I get the more I see coverage is a sort of mirage. The important thing is to introduce a few basic legal principles and show how they emerge out of case studies or practical problems of life. Then, I would acquaint students with the way that law is actually used by practioners (District Attorneys in charging instruments; an actual apartment lease; a warranty, etc.).

Conclusion

I think that the vision that originally motivated Arbetman and O'Brien 30 years ago still is very worthy of being cultivated. However, I would not be so excited about learning Street Law, or teaching it, with the text provided. Move from life to text, rather than vice versa, and you will eventually find that you have a lot of students who will want to learn the texts.