This poster session will focus on how a role-playing negotiation exercise can be used to teach substantive tort law and legal process. The negotiation exercise arises out of claims brought by a fictional Tammy Weintraub on behalf of both the estate of her late husband Howard and herself individually against the driver of another automobile, Estelle Latimore ("the pill-popping, wine-guzzling Estelle Latimore") and the County Road Commission that allegedly opened a newly resurfaced road without an adequate roadside-shoulder and without proper warning signs. Each student represents one of the three parties in the negotiation and is provided with some information available to all parties, e.g., police reports and deposition excerpts and other confidential information available to only one party, e.g., reports of investigators.

      The students initially prepare a brief memo analyzing the application of both (1) the law they have learned during the semester and (2) additional reading assignments on damages and sovereign immunity to the facts of the case. Once the memos have been submitted to the professor, the each student then negotiates as a member of a two-person team with similar teams representing the two other parties. When the negotiation is completed, the students answer a brief questionnaire asking them about the negotiation results, the negotiation process, and, in an open-ended manner, what they learned from the experience. Their submissions provide the substance for what is generally a lively and informative classroom discussion.

      The goals of the Weintraub v. Latimore and County Road Commission negotiation simulation include teaching students about the following issues:

1. The indeterminacy of legal rules and uncertainty of facts in the real world;

2. How an adversary's role affects a lawyer's perception of an incident;

3. Substantive principles such as comparative fault that can best be taught by application to actual or simulated fact patterns rather than by Socratic dialog, discussion or lecture;

4. The intricacies of how comparative fault, joint and several liability, and contribution among tortfeasors interact with each other;

5. How legal rules and principles do and do not affect negotiation; and

6. An introduction to the idea that negotiation is a subject that can be analyzed.