Teaching in a Larger Social Context: Using Simulations to Demonstrate Socioeconomic Principles and Their Relevance to Law

In this Article, the authors describe socioeconomic theory application to law simulations that require student competition or cooperation and which demonstrate problems that their areas of law are designed to address. Stake uses two socioeconomic concepts to introduce students to property. First, he has an exercise that uses the allocation of property rights in whales to illustrate the concept of rent seeking or the possibility that a competitive market may induce investors to spend more collectively than they can hope to recover. Second, he uses cognitive psychology to analyze adverse possession.

Dau-Schmidt, in the second half of his paper with Stake, describes innovative exercises he used in courses in labor and employment to illustrate employer-employee relationships.