Roberto L. Corrada, University of Denver College of Law Active & Collaborative Law Learning Project at the University of Denver College of Law Both teaching and learning are successfully accomplished in the typical American law school during the first year of law instruction. Law students arrive fresh and ready to study law. They learn to brief cases and slowly begin to master the give and take “Socratic” approach adopted by most professors. The students are invigorated and challenged by the learning of law, and ultimately learn some of the basic critical analytical skills needed to engage in legal practice. First year professors are motivated and energized by the level of student preparedness and curiosity. Certainly, there are ways to improve the first year, but for the most part it works well. By the time these same students enter the third year of law school, however, the motivation and energy are mostly gone. Teaching often suffers as a result. Why is this? Part of the reason is that students have become, by the third year, familiar and bored with the socratic give and take, they know that performance in class and on the exam do not always correlate, and they have more or less mastered the analytical approach to caselaw and statutes. I have made active and collaborative learning interventions into the predominant lecture-style teaching models used in upper level law school courses with some success. Research in the education field has shown the promise of intertwined active and collaborative learning approaches. “Collaborative learning … emphasizes the virtues of active involvement. It requires students to take the initiative in the classroom, to become active creators rather than passive recipients of knowledge, and to rely on each other as much or more than on the teacher’s authority.” (Hansen & Stephens, 2000). Education studies show that “the difficult abilities of decision-making and problem-solving are best taught through learning groups.” (Michaelson, Fink & Knight, 1997). “Drawing analogies from everyday learning, researchers argue that knowledge is contextualized; that is, learners construct knowledge by solving complex problems in situations in which they use cognitive tools, multiple sources of information, and other individuals as resources. (Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989; Resnick, 1987). Moreover, because learning occurs in a social context, learners interact with and internalize models of knowing and thinking represented and practiced in a community (Toulmin, 1972).” See Phyllis C. Blumenfeld et al., Motivating Project-Based Learning: Sustaining the Doing, Supporting the Learning, 26 Educational Psychologist 369, 371 (1991). The success of the educational constructivist model for complex decision-making and problem-solving makes it easily adaptable to law school. I have adopted active and collaborative strategies in two disparate upper level law classes - labor law and administrative law. My talk at the AALS conference would mostly concentrate on the education literature involving such learning. Then, I would talk about adapting the model for law school use. In labor law, students organize a student union to bargain with me about the terms and conditions of the class. The benefits of this approach have been documented extensively in Roberto L. Corrada, A Simulation of Union Organizing in a Labor Law Class, 46 Journal of Legal Education 445 (1996). Professors at two other law schools have adopted the approach. In Administrative Law, the Michael Crichton novel Jurassic Park serves as a factual platform for student creation of a biotech regulatory scheme. The students will work in teams to draft legislation creating various regulatory mechanisms to address the scenario that unfolds in Jurassic Park as if it were a real-world problem.