I wanted the first class to be very informal - just a way for my Teaching Assistant (Sally) and I to get to know the students. When they arrived, we had the chairs arranged in a circle, and each student took a place. We played a few name games - 'My name is Amy and I'm amazing, my name is Ben and I'm brilliant,' to start off. We worked out which students were the same age, who had to travel the furthest every weekend. This took up about the first forty-five minutes of class, but was definitely worth it to get the students comfortable with each other, and with us.
For the very first lesson, I read out 10 laws / legal scenarios, and had the students vote on which were potentially true or not. (See document in next post for full list!) Most of these were very bizarre ("It is illegal for students of Trinity College Dublin to walk across campus without swords.") but all totally true. The students picked about 50/50 true/false and were shocked when I revealed them all to be true.
This led to a group discussion on why it's important to study law --> mainly because if we were still following these rules, we would be carrying swords across college campuses and throwing dwarves against walls (Until 1991, a popular past-time in France was to throw dwarves covered in Velcro against a wall. Whoever threw their dwarf the furthest would win a prize.)
At this point, I asked the students what they knew about law, as opposed to laws, and how they could define it. A lot of answers were based on things being right and obeying the law. A good catch-all description from Byrne &McCutcheon is
- "that which governs human behaviour either by prohibiting identified forms of conduct or by attaching particular consequences to specified forms of behaviour."
Put simply for 8-12 year olds: making laws we have to adhere to and giving appropriate punishments to those who break them.
What would happen, then, if we didn't have law? Essentially, there would be anarchy. The students mostly understood what anarchy was, "It's when everything is crazy and people go around stealing things from shops." A good umbrella description is "...a state where there is no government and where each individual has absolute liberty."
Imagine what would happen if everyone could do what they want? Ask the students what exactly would be wrong with anarchy, and to think of some examples where it is completely essential that we have law (and people to enforce it.)
Some good examples:
- speed limits
- seatbelt laws
- drink-driving
- litter laws
After this we talked a little bit about why the law needs to exist. We talked about the idea of deterrence, that the law exists to make sure people don't break it - kind of like a circle idea.
We talked about whether law should be taught in schools, and I introduced the concept of ignorant juris non excusat. This translates as: ignorance of the law is no excuse. Therefore, if you didn't know that murder was against the law, and you killed somebody, you would still be liable for any punishment. We discussed whether or not this was a good idea. The students had some good points - it's easier then for smarter people to stay out of trouble; if we didn't have this rule then maybe anarchy would develop as everybody would pretend they didn't know certain laws existed.
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