Everyone Learns Law
Everyone Learns Law
The 48th in the Egan Pattern Language
1. A problem
We feel “the law” as an alien presence hovering above our decisions. It promises to be so hopelessly complicated that one needs to pay a specialist to engage with it on our behalf — and it scares us to think that someone could frivolously sue us, and mire us up in months of paperwork.
2. Basic plan
In middle school, perhaps once a month, drop an utterly bizarre real-world case on students. Pull them from the realm of criminal law, contract disputes, property fights, and torts. Start by telling the story that led to the case, and talk about the principles involved. Then assign the students sides, and have them argue it! Declare one side the winner.
At the end, tell the rest of the story — how the real-world court decided the case, and what happened to the disputants afterwards.
3. What you might see
First, you’ll see students listening to weird stories: people suing McDonald’s for their coffee being too hot, ex-lovers suing to get ownership of their dog, a burglar suing the homeowner after being injured by a trap set for him, a monkey suing to claim the copyright of a selfie he took,1 a grocer suing the Port of New York over whether tomatoes are “vegetables” or “fruit”… and some more salacious ones. (Cannibalism: educational gold.2)
After hearing the story, the students naming the questions and issues that the case seems to raise. Then, those students being assigned to a side, and having to argue in favor
4. Why?
A passion for justice seems to come naturally to teenagers. (This is good!) Left alone, it’ll remain ridiculously naïve. (This is bad.)
Teens are quick to jump to conclusions, seeing everything in black-and-white because their moral intuitions haven’t been tested against reality. They’ll fight for what feels right without considering what works or how things connect to deeper, systemic issues.
That’s where the law comes in: it’s the result of thousands of years of smart people thinking hard about how to weigh values against each other: rights against responsibilities, freedom against order. By digging into these cases, we’re not just feeding teens’ hunger for justice — we’re teaching them how to think wisely about the world.
5. Egan’s insight
Where do we see this in the human experience?
The fact that courtroom dramas have been one of the most-watched genres of television for nearly 80 years (Perry Mason premiered in 1957, his children include Matlock, Ally McBeal, Boston Legal, and The Good Wife) probably says something important about human nature.
How might this build different kinds of understanding?
Debating both sides of a bizarre historical court case has it all. It hooks kids through the tools of MYTHIC and ROMANTIC understanding: we love learning the 🧙♂️GOSSIP of strangers’ lives, especially when they include 🦹♂️BIZARRE DETAILS. Learning more about them shows us that there’s always more going on than meets the eye, and thus pushes us from 🧙♂️SIMPLE STORIES to 🦹♂️COMPLEX STORIES.
But these narratives pull us up into PHILOSOPHIC thinking — we fight for one side in a 👩🔬BATTLE OF IDEAS, and need to comprehend 👩🔬FINICKY DEFINITIONS to win.
Famous court cases often point to 👩🔬ANOMALIES in social life, which lead us to considering the necessary 😏AMBIGUITIES of any law. And all of this is carried by the fact that we’re 🤸♀️IMITATING real-world lawyers — 🤸♀️ROLE PLAY comes naturally to us. (What do these weird emoji mean?)
6. This might be especially useful for…
Kids who desperately, desperately want to argue with you.
7. Critical questions
Q: But you wouldn’t want to JUST pick the cases that are the most bizarre, right?
Correct — oftentimes, you want to choose the bizarre cases that helped shape the law. But don’t sacrifice the human interest angle.
Q: Is this just American law, or what?
Every class should definitely put a focus on their local laws — in America, that means going down to the state, the county, and even the city. That’s because it’s helpful to know them.
But you also want to pick older cases that go back to the origins of your country’s legal code. For quite a lot of places (places as far apart as Australia, Canada, Singapore, Ireland, and Bangladesh), that means the English common law tradition. For quite a lot of the rest (like Germany, Brazil, China, and Indonesia), that means Roman (“civil”) law.
You’ll also want to include some cases chosen from a very different legal tradition. Nepal uses a mix of ancient Hindu law and local customs, Saudi Arabia uses Sharia law, Vatican City uses canon law, and North Korea uses, well, something exactly as horrible as you’d expect!
In that vein, you’ll definitely want to choose some cases from tribal laws around the world — like Rwanda’s community-based Gacaca courts (used to promote justice and reconciliation after the 1994 genocide), or the Maori customary law (which emphasize collective responsibility and social cohesion).
The point of this is to show that our laws weren’t inevitable — they’re things humans made. And if we made them, we can change them.
Q: You mentioned “cannibalism” above. Doesn’t that that seem unnecessarily grisly for kids?
In my experience: for second graders, definitely; for fifth graders, conceivably; and for eighth graders, probably not.
But every kid is different, and cultures differ. Your mileage may vary; it’d be silly for me to set down any hard-and-fast rules.
Q: But now I’m interested — what WAS the cannibal case?
It’s a fictional case from the classic law review article from the 1940s (“The Case of the Speluncean Explorers”) which I didn’t know existed before yesterday and which I now can’t stop thinking about. The gist: five cave explorers are trapped, and realize the only way any of them will survive to be rescued is if they kill and eat one of their group. They all agree, and after throwing dice to choose the unlucky one, follow through with the plan. Then the four survivors are rescued… and arrested for murder. Are they guilty?
Because this is fictional, it allows the author (a legal philosopher) to write an entirely different opinion for each of the five judges. You can read about them on Wikipedia or watch more on YouTube.
Q: What kinds of law should we focus on?
Constitutional law professor Jack Thorlin (see below) suggested we not start with constitutional law, but steer toward the macabre elements of criminal law, contract law, property law, and torts. This seems wise to me.
8. Physical space
You’ll note that I’ve focused this pattern more on the “what” and “why” than on the “how”, but probably there’s some useful work to be done here (platforms for debaters, space for mock courts, that sort of thing).
9. Who else is doing this?
I’m flying blind here, and we’d really benefit from seeing programs that do law stuff in middle and high schools. We’d also benefit from any previously-existing books or curriculums that give both relevant cases and the human stories behind them.
How might we start small, now?
Do you know of anything like that? Throw it in the comments!
10. Related patterns
If you squint, this looks a little like a gamified DUELING HISTORIES°. And it’s one way to bring PHILOSOPHY EVERYWHERE°.
Afterword:
Special thanks to Jack Thorlin who helped me imagine the details of this! You might know Jack from his work as an attorney at the CIA, or as a counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, or as an assistant professor of constitutional law.3 But you probably didn’t know that his bachelor’s was in mechanical engineering… or that he’s one of the winners of the 2024 Astral Codex Ten book review contest! His review of the book How the War Was Won gives a very different interpretation of how the Allies vanquished the Germans and Japanese in World War Two, and how modern wars work in general. Highly recommended.
Special thanks also to
for suggesting this pattern in a comment. (I’ll also be expediting the others that have been mentioned — thanks, guys!) Want to suggest another? Check the index, and go for it!Reminder: our next livestream will be Halloween at 9pm Eastern / 6pm Pacific. We’ll pick something terribly dull from math, and have 50 minutes to plumb its depths and show how interesting it secretly is… only using ChatGPT and Egan’s tools. It’s free! You can sign up here.
Well, it was PETA filing on the monkey’s behalf, but whatever.
I refer to the classic law review article by the philosopher Lon Fuller — which I didn’t know existed before yesterday and which I now can’t stop thinking about. The gist: five cave explorers are trapped, and realize the only way any of them will survive to be rescued is if they kill and eat one of their group. They all agree, and after throwing dice to choose the unlucky one, follow through with the plan. Then the four survivors are rescued… and arrested for murder. Are they guilty?
This is fictional, which allows the author to write an entirely different opinion for each judge. You can read about them on Wikipedia or watch more on YouTube.
I mean, assuming you hang around Washington, D.C. and Langley, VA. Though, come to think of it, I never see you there anymore…
FWIW, there are absolutely real cannibalism legal cases; especially one very high profile one in England in 1884 that remains very relevant in English and American law. Admittedly my knowledge level on this is "I read two wikipedia pages and watched a youtube video" but you may be interested in "R v Dudley and Stephens" and look up the "custom of the sea"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custom_of_the_sea
My (very amateur) understanding is: The "custom of the sea" referred to an agreement agreement widely understood among sailors and the British general public that if sailors were shipwrecked and starving, then if (and only if!) everyone present consented, then they would draw lots and kill/eat the unfortunate one picked. (If I'm understanding this right, the reason killing/eating someone was preferable to letting them die of natural causes is because killing them earlier left more drinkable blood in the body to avoid dying of thirst. Fun.) This was allegedly a very publicly-accepted custom, but definitely not law. English courts thought the whole thing was terrible and had long been "waiting for a case" with a set of circumstances that they could definitively declare this whole practice illegal, no matter how much public sympathy shipwrecked sailors had.
The "R v Dudley and Stephens" case (British case in 1884) ultimately did declare the whole thing illegal. It's an interesting one partly because in this case the "custom" was *not* adhered to. Four sailors were shipwrecked.; after about ten days, one of them got sick and fell unconscious. They discussed drawing lots; one of the conscious sailors refused. They also discussed killing the unconscious sailor since he was probably dying anyway. Eventually two (or three, disputed) of the sailors killed the unconscious one; all three of them ate some of him. Then finally two weeks later they got picked up. So there was no drawing of lots, and therefore no custom.
After they got rescued, the three of them made their reports to some administrator, which was going to be business as usual -- none of them expected to be charged with murder. A local policeman overheard, sent the news up the chain, and eventually the three of them got charged with murder. Two of them were ultimately convicted of murder (they dropped the charges against the last one so he would testify). It set a very important precedent because judges all made it clear that the lots/agreement wouldn't have mattered from a legal perspective, the whole thing was murder and the "necessity" did not justify it under the law. (But they also commuted the death sentence and gave them 6 months in prison instead, way lighter than a typical murder sentence -- and also the public sentiment was apparently very much that the necessity *did* justify it and they shouldn't have been convicted.) This was apparently the last openly admitted cannibalism case for British or American sailors.
This case also ended up being really important as a precedent because it was used to argue that many other kinds of necessity weren't considered justifications for murder! Wikipedia says this case is "one of a few criminal cases taught to all law students in England and Wales" and that it is a "standard legal case taught to first year American law students and is often the first criminal case read in American law schools." But [citation needed] for both of those wikipedia quotes, so take that with a grain of salt. (Also, this isn't universal! There were cases in Norway that went the other way!)
If the case really is that famous, I can only assume Fuller must have known about it when writing the Speluncean law review article to probe the ethical+legal issues around this. But this makes his little disclaimer at the end that, basically, any connection between this work and real events is coincidental, a absolutely hilariously thin veneer.
Highly recommend David Friedman’s “Legal Systems Very Different from Ours”, especially on embedded legal systems.