Last week, I had the opportunity to fulfill my lifelong dream of being a lawyer! Ok not really my lifelong dream but it was an interesting experience none the less. My Arts in Society class was given the task of recreating the Supreme Court case, ” Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier”. We were assigned to three groups, the Supreme Court Justices, the petitioners who represented the school and the respondents who represented the lawyers of the student journalists. I was assigned to represent the school along with Brittany Tewari and Skye King. My team prepared to make the argument by looking up the actual case on various websites including the ever popular Wikipedia along with more reliable websites such as Oyez, the Chicago-Kent College of Law website which supplied a brief summary of the case and discussed the verdict and what the actual Supreme Court Judges said about the case. We conversed online and shared the information we found with each other. My method for writing what I was going to say was opening Microsoft word and just writing what came into my head. I looked at all the relevant website and pieced together information that would work well as an argument. When it came time to give our argument in class I was pretty confident because I literally had a script of what I wanted to say in front of me so I didn’t lose my train of thought. The rebuttal was much harder because there was only so much you could prepare in advance (honestly I didn’t really prepare for that part). I listened carefully to what the responding party was saying during their argument and tried to find a counter argument for it. I know we only had one class to do the whole case and we were running short on time as it was but I think an improvement would be giving more time in between the argument and the rebuttal so both sides could properly form what they wanted to say. A couple times I was trying to google something relevant to the case but didn’t have time to properly articulate it. By the time I looked something up regarding one point I had missed the next point the respondents made. I know we are confined by time so it wasn’t a big deal, just a suggestion on what could be improved. The verdict was a little disappointing because obviously it would be nice to “win” the case, but overall it wasn’t a day ruiner. I think the judge already had their mind made up about the case and I sensed more hostility towards the petitioner side than the respondent side but as I said not a big deal. Overall I really enjoyed this experience, usually I’m not a fan of things that require outside work but this was cool. I did Mock Trial a couple years in high school so it was bit of a throwback for me. I’m enjoying this class I lot more than some of my other classes because of the activities we do, it’s a nice change from listening to someone talk for several hours a day.
Experience Rating: 9/10
Hi 