I mentioned, as you might imagine, that we were working on Murder One and that I had a primitive version of it on my computer. In the middle of the night I heard some noise in my study and went to investigate. My nine year old nephew had been working away at Murder One for many hours. The full trial was not implemented on the version that he was working on, so, try as he could, he could not tell whether or not he had gotten a conviction. The noise that woke me up was his fist banging on the desk as, time after time, he got one of those dumb computer messages when he had been hoping to have the judge tell him whether or not he had won the case.
Legal controversies have a primal meaning that most people find gripping.
By putting the controversy first, a computer simulation can grip the student's mind in a way that putting the laws first cannot. Simulations can provide the student an intuitive sense of the legal process that then becomes the grist for formal study. They can provide a context for laws, revealing, for example, why it is that the rules of evidence are as they are. Finally, if they are compelling enough, they can extend an understanding of law to non-lawyers, enhancing, one might expect, their performance as citizens, producers, and parents. There is, I suspect, an underlying demand for compeliing legal simulations that extends far beyond law school.