Law Role Plays Skits Criminal Justice

This is a 5 slide powerpoint presentation of two criminal role plays for the class. The Instructor plays the suspect in each of them while students play the police officers. The offense involves a large screen tv stolen from a condo clubhouse.

I am a lawyer who has practiced law, taught it in the classroom and sold a best selling textbook. The class can silently read the case in the classroom via this slideshow. Then you can move them into other activities which I also list here. In teaching law in the community college classroom, I discovered one had to be inventive in transcending the boredom that many students face with legal subjects. I used my creativity to overcome this difficulty. I used a lot of my own visuals (as an artist). I briefed cases in understandable language about landmark decisions which changed our lives. I devised role plays for students to act with me in front of the class. I played the lawyer to them in many different legal roles as client. We played games like Jeopardy. As these methods took hold in my classroom, the interest level spiked much higher and the students approached the law with a lot more interest and energy. Over time, this also decreased the amount of work I had to do in the classroom as the materials took over the work for me. It is my hope that you can bring this same higher level of involvement and creativity to the law in your classroom. These materials should also work with high schoolers as often my community college students were at a high school level.