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3 Law Tchr. 1 (1995-1996)

handle is hein.journals/lawteaer3 and id is 1 raw text is: t* THE LAW EACHER GONZAGA UNIVERSITY Institute for Law School Teaching Fall 1995 Hardhat teaching By Gregory M. Stein F or the past five years, I have taught a Land Acquisition and Development Seminar. This upper- level course tends to attract the ten or fifteen students in each class who, like their teacher, cannot walk past a construction site without peering over the fence for a few minutes. Several times in past years, students have suggested that it would be valuable to visit a construction site at some point during the semester; perhaps to meet with the owner, the general contractor, and the architect; and to get a sense from How my people in the business about how a project progresses. For some students to a const reason, I never followed up on watching U1 their suggestions. But an irresistible opportunity arose last year, when the University of Tennessee College of Law began a thirty-month renovation and expansion project. Toward the end of the semester, the university's director of facilities planning, the general contractor's project manager, and the project architect met with the class and me. By this point, students had spent most of the semester representing the various parties involved in the construction of fictional Trumpet Tower. They had studied the intricacies of development financing and had drafted and negotiated construction and permanent loan documents. They had examined the American Institute of Architects' standard construction documents. But nothing that I did in class could simulate bargaining leverage, scheduling desperation, time pressure from actual clients (as opposed to a fictional client who grades students at the end of the term), sinkholes, unexpected aquifers, or heavy rains. In short, the students had been playing poker with chips not backed by cash, and I needed to bring in people not unlike their future clients to import some reality into the Trumpet Tower project. I entered the special class session with some trepidation. Although I had practiced real estate law for four years and had been exposed to construction law, I had been teaching for five years and was increasingly worried that I had become rusty. Perhaps my background provided an accurate portrayal of the world of 1990, but was I hopelessly out-of- date? Perhaps the books and documents we had used in class were credible, but are the scholars who write in the field as knowledgeable about the construction process as I had always optimistically assumed? it tr I was introducing experts to the class who could credibly dispute my knowledge. I was reminded of the time in seventh grade when I became convinced my Spanish teacher was actually making everything up as she went along, perversely inventing grammatical rules and verb tenses, perhaps teaching us Portuguese or a fictional childhood language of her own. How would we have known? Back then, I would periodically turn on old UHF channel 47 - the local Spanish-language station - as a way of verifying I her credentials. Today, the nd development students would verify mine. The class went quite well, uction site was like at least as best as I could F channel 47. judge. Nearly all of the students showed up for this optional session on a beautiful spring Friday at the peak of the dogwood season. I had asked each of them to bring in a short list of questions - in particular, questions about local practices that they had asked me during the year and for which I had been able to offer only uncertain answers. Nearly all of the students asked pointed questions based on their increasing knowledge. They received straightforward responses from knowledgeable, skilled experts. They interacted, as professionals, with professionals. The first hour of the two-hour session produced a few substantive law surprises. As it turns out, lien waivers, a topic on which we had spent a great deal of class time, seem to be infrequently used on projects in this part of the country. And the AIA form documents are only rarely negotiated in state projects - the state simply drafts supplementary conditions, attaches them to the commercially prepared form document, and seeks bids on the package. But all in all, the first hour of the class accomplished exactly what I had hoped, by adding the one missing ingredient - reality - to Continued on page 2 Inside Pictures may be worth more than words ...... 3 Legends in the classroom ......................... 5 Using questions effectively ....................... 6 The YUK word .......................................... 9

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