Using Videos as Fact Patterns

In preparing for the new semester, legal research and writing teachers should consider using a video instead of  a written fact pattern.  C|M|LAW professor Karin Mika uses videos as fact patterns in her 1L class, for example the video of the ski lift incident you see here.   Using video fact patterns engages students and avoids a “canned” fact situation that focuses on the very issues that the professor would like the students to identify.  As discussed in a recent article by Professor Mika, videos can also be used to present a copyright issue for a student assignment.

Currently, there are few things more important to students than their music, and the creativity explosion that has been engendered by the Internet has raised voluminous legal issues related to intellectual property, especially as they relate to music and music videos.  …  All of these aspects of assessing the law not only give the students a much broader way of seeing the various arguments of both sides of the issue, but also a context that relates to their day-to-day lives.  They listen to their music a little bit differently, and look at some of the music presented in videos a bit more reflectively. The use of the research problem seems to accomplish what it is that we all strive for—presenting a lasting lesson in law and in life that changes or modifies a perspective not even considered prior to law school.

See  Karin Mika, Sight and Sound in the Legal Writing Classroom: Engaging Studen ts Through Use of Contemporary Issues, 21 Perspectives: Teaching Legal Res. & Writing 132 (2013).