Incorporating a sophisticated Supreme Court simulation into an undergraduate constitutional law class

Role playing activities and Supreme Court simulations have been a popular teaching tool in constitutional law courses for many years. These projects can range from a short judicial decision making scenario to a full-semester Supreme Court simulation involving lawyers, interest groups, and justices (Claude and Parker, 1984; Hensley, 1993; Baker, 1994). Textbooks are now available to assist an instructor in developing a Supreme Court simulation project for a course (Bowers and Daniels, 1998; Dolan and Ezra, 2002) and numerous online resources make it easier to prepare role playing or simulation assignments. This paper explains how to incorporate a sophisticated Supreme Court simulation into an undergraduate constitutional law course. Instead of having students play the role of a generic justice who must decide a case, the simulation described below requires students to assume the roles of current Supreme Court justices and they must decide cases and write an opinion from the perspective of the justice they are playing. This type of role playing assignment requires higher-order thinking because students must apply their substantive knowledge of constitutional law and the jurisprudence of their justice i