John Cicero, CUNY School of Law Labor Law My approach to teaching labor law “analogizes the classroom to the industrial shop floor”1 and involves a process of interactive teaching through simulations, problems and discussion, which draws upon some of the natural parallels that exist between workers and their employer and students and their school. In each setting a hierarchy exists that places workers and students in a lower status that can rob them of any effective voice in regulating their respective “workplaces.” Like a boss, a professor can directly impact (control) the fate of a student. “Just as a teacher retains authority for planning and grades, the supervisor...retains power to hire, to fire and to give raises...”2 My goal is to ultimately allow students to see the effects of that dynamic on workers and to have them re-evaluate and perhaps abandon the assumptions they possessed concerning the employment relationship and the “proper” status of workers. Furthermore, the use of an interactive or experiential approach to teaching labor law allows students to better understand the values that underlie the law and to experience for themselves some of the issues that confront workers. In turn, this will generate greater interest in and a more genuine understanding of the employment relationship. I also attempt to show students that labor law is not a relic of history, but a complex living law that regulates a “fundamental dimension of human existence”3 - meaningful work. Students are taught basic labor law doctrine through the use of hypotheticals, class discussion, a movie (Harlan County), a documentary (Harvest of Shame) and interactive exercises that are meant to engage them in the application of doctrine. Students are placed in role as employees of a fictional company, Expresso Trucking & Mfg. Co. Throughout the semester, their dual status as fictional employees and as students is used to create workplace issues for discussion and analysis. My presentation at the conference would combine a teaching demonstration (involving an employer’s delivery of an anti-union captive audience speech) with a descriptive highlighting of the interactive pedagogy of the course and, time permitting, storytelling about the way in which the pedagogy has worked. For example, I will narrate on those instances (set forth in detail in the draft handout) on which my students have engaged in a strike of my class. 4 1 See Margaret Martin Barry, Jon C. Dubin and Peter A. Joy, Clinical Education For This Millennium: The Third Wave, 7 Clinical L. Rev. 1 (Fall, 2000). 2 Susan Bryant, Collaboration In Law Practice: A Satisfying and Productive Process for a Diverse Profession, 17 Vermont Law Review 459, 470 n. 49 (1993). 3 David L. Gregory, Catholic Labor Theory and the Transformation of Work, 45 Washington and Lee Law Review 119, 130 (1988). 4 This proposal, which highlights the pedagogy used in the labor law course, is excerpted from C. John Cicero, The Classroom as Shop Floor: Images of Work and the Study of Labor Law, 20 Vermont Law Review