Hello, Hello! And Welcome to our Inaugural Installment of one of our regular features: the Law Theater Blog!

    An Introduction: I am Prof./Dr. Samantha M. McDermitt, the Founder and Executive Director of the Project. I teach in the University System of Maryland and have done so for nearly twenty-five years. Check out my Bio., for the list of Disciplines in which I’ve taught and do teach! Also, the Project is not only about Law and various Theatrical plays and presentations of it, but also about History, Government, Ethics, Cultural, Social, and Political concerns, which are explicitly and implicitly in pronouncements by the Supreme Court.

    Alexis de Tocqueville once observed in the Early 19thCentury, that ours is a litigious society and that most, if not all, concerns of social importance in the U.S., find their ways to the U.S. Supreme Court. That has not changed in nearly two hundred years! We live History during every Term of that Court, from the First Monday in October each Fall, until 30 June of the following year. I invite all interested folks, to partake of our play texts, which dramatize some of the more important cases, decided by the Supreme Court, over the past 200+ years!

    Also, here’s a little known fact: some of the best free entertainment happens in State and local courtrooms!. . .

    One other introductory note: the idea for the Project originated in a Final Project/Paper that I assigned to an Introduction to Philosophy section, which I taught six years ago at one of my universities. The course was part of a “Learning Community,” whose theme was “The Courts & Society.” My academic partner in the Community was a Sociology professor, teaching Introduction to Sociology. But the two, substantive courses had to be stand-alone, with their own assignments, etc.

    As the Final Project, I assigned a Role-play and Final Paper, based on each student’s role in the “play.” I fictionalized an actual case, which had occurred in the U. S. District Court in Washington, D.C., and set it, as though it were going to the U.S. Supreme Court. I trained nine “Student Justices,” taught them the actual ways in which the Court operates (as opposed to what we are taught in what we used to call “Civics Class”), and taught them Oral Argument and Conference techniques. I also trained six students to be advocates, three per side. The remaining members of the class were assigned as “law clerks” to various Justices.

    We held the Oral Argument in the final class session, and the students did VERY well!! I then took the Court members into a separate room, and, having taught them how Court case conferences generally work, I played “fly-on-the-wall,” as they discussed, voted on, and decided the case. . .Afterward, all students had to write a detailed paper, each, from their individual perspectives, based on their characters.

    Overall, the class did SO well that I asked them, before we “adjourned” in open class again, after the announcement of “the decision,” IF they’d like to perform it again! Some indicated interest! So, over that Christmas Break, I drafted a full, three-act play on the case we did in class. After three years of re-writing, planning, etc., we presented the play at the same university, though only one or two students from the original course held on and were in it. Regardless, the cast we had was GREAT, having been chosen from among other, interested students, faculty, and staff at that school. Afterwards, we had a Q&A session between the audience members and me, which was also very good!

    With such a nice start, I began, early last year, to write dramatizations of very important, ACTUAL Supreme Court cases. . . In the next installment of this Blog, I shall go into the detail of HOW I research and write my plays, which now number seven, full-length, two-act plays and six short ones, as well as other “fun” stuff about our ever-evolving Project!. . .

    TTFN!