Linda Bucci is a professor and program chair of Justice Studies at Lasell. She's also Graduate Program Chair of Criminal Justice and frequent judge of Lasell's long mock trial tradition.

Steven Rosenthal is a lecturer in Legal Studies at Lasell and a facilitator of the symposium Mock Trial. He's also coach of Lasell's mock trial team that competes at the American Mock Trial Association.

In this episode, we sit down in the TLC with Linda Bucci and Steven Rosenthal to chat about the history and highlights of Lasell's mock trial. We discuss how it develops skill in critical thinking, teamwork, and preparing students for any challenge, in legal advocacy and beyond.

Audio Podcast

Related Resources

Contact LBucci@lasell.edu if interested in serving as a juror in the Lasell mock trial (4/28 in Stoller from 1pm - 3:30ish)

The American Mock Trial Association

Text Transcript

Heidi: Welcome back to the teaching and learning at Lasell podcast with Matt and Heidi from the TLC.

Matt: Welcome back. Today we've invited Linda Bucci and Steve Rosenthal to talk with us today. Linda is the professor and program chair of Justice Studies, Graduate Program Chair of Criminal Justice and most often judge of the mock trial here at Lasell. Steven Rosenthal is a lecturer in Legal Studies at Lasell and a facilitator of the symposium Mock Trial and coach of the mock trial team that competes at the American Mock Trial Association.

They are both here today to talk with us about the history of mock trial at symposium and highlights of the experience that's happened over the years. Welcome to both of you. Also here today is Lee [Means], who is going to be attending this discussion.

Lee Means: Well, welcome. We're glad you're here.

Linda Bucci: Thank you.

Steven Rosenthal: Thank you.

How did mock trial get its start at Lasell? How do you prepare each semester?

Matt: So, Linda. Steve, how did the mock trial get its start at Lasell?

Linda: So that's a really good question, and I've been here twenty-one years, and when I first got here and we were laying out the program for legal studies, and at the same time reevaluating some of the mission and goals of Lasell, we thought of connected learning. And when we created LS101, which is the introductory course for students in legal studies, we decided that we would culminate with a project at the end of the class, which would be a mock trial, no matter the major.

And then from there, it was considered a pedagogical tool that others looked at and thought about and figured out if they would use similar kinds of ideas. And then it became part of the symposium when it started in 2002.

Matt: I've always it fascinating the idea of a roleplay when the students get a chance to take the theory that they learned from the class, but apply it to an actual trial.

Linda: The best part about it, I think, is that students, no matter their major, could learn skills that are valuable, like how to stand on your feet, how to improvise when things come up, how to prepare and work as a team. So all of those skills come together. And if at the same time you think maybe you might want to be a lawyer someday, it is a way to get a feel for what some of it would be like.

Steven: If I could add to that, I think the symposium mock trial is a way of not only exposing them to trial practice, learning certain trial skills, but as Linda said, they have to learn how to think on their feet, and that is something that comes in handy, no matter what their major is.

As a result of that experience, some of the students have gone on to take the mock trial practicum, in which a Lasell team competes against teams from other colleges and universities.

Lee: When you begin the class the first day of the semester, do you start preparing for a mock trial at that point?

Steven: No. Usually, the last few weeks of the semester are spent focusing on the mock trial. In LS101, it's kind of almost like a survey course of the law. And things that perhaps you study for a year in law school, you studied for two weeks in LS101.

But we put a month into, or maybe three-and-a-half, four weeks into the mock trial to prepare for the symposium. Because it's a group project, there's a prosecution team and a defense team. They have to devise their own strategy for how to present the case and what the theory is for the prosecution, for the defense. That takes some extra time. And since we don't have a lot of time to do that, I spend part of each class teaching about certain aspects of trial practice, and then they break into groups and they work on their strategies separately.

Matt: Do you often have new cases each semester. Do any cases recur?

Steven: No. We try to...try not to repeat cases, mainly because our jurors get bored. Because it's so abbreviated, we try to pick cases that have been used at the high school level. You know, high school mock trial competitions.

Linda: Mostly for their facts.

Steven: Yeah.

Linda: Because they're already set up, and high school mock trial competitions are a very common occurrence and have been going on for a really long time.

Steven: Right, this year, or at least this semester, there are fewer students in the class. So, in the past, we usually have three witnesses for the prosecution, three for the defense, and their attorneys asking direct and cross-examination questions. Because of the size of the class this semester, I found a case from 30 years ago, which had only two witnesses on each side, so the math worked better for us this semester.

Highlights from mock trial over the years

Lee: What highlights stand out to you?

Steven: Well, in terms of LS101, the highlights to me are simply that some students seem to find themselves, and whether it leads to their going on to the mock trial practicum or not, it's nice to see them discovering, “Hey, this is something I can do, and I'm enjoying this,” and maybe in some cases they want to take it further.

I find also that at the end of each trial, no matter what the result is, They're really kind of excited about what has happened. Same thing as when I was trying cases, you think the next day, "Oh, I should have asked this question, I should have done that." And they're just bursting with these ideas.

They also get feedback from the jurors or faculty and staff members and sometimes students who have been in the mock trial practicum. And it's great for them to get that kind of feedback as well.

Linda: At the same time, they get that whole understanding of how the real system works. It forces them to do the critical thinking of, "Well, maybe it's not just black and white: who wins, who loses." It's the human element of the jury. It's a learning experience that they bring to the next level, and they can see how what they do impacts how a person thinks about their presentation.

One of the most important parts, I think, is the jurors come back -- and the jurors love what they do. They love doing it; They love watching the students -- but they come back and we ask them not to worry. Win, lose. None of that matters. Tell us what you liked, what you thought. And for me, it's like when I was at practice, you get to see what the jury's really thinking based on what you did is not exactly what you thought they were thinking, for example, and that causes you to plan for the next time to think about your presentation skills. And all of that's valuable.

Lee: From what you're saying, it sounds like students really see that they can change an outcome. They have direct ability to make a difference, whether they know it or not.

Steven: I think also some of them are put in a position of taking a stance that may not be what they might take given the choice.

In other words, I had a student approach me after I assigned roles for this semester's mock trial, and she said, "Well, I'd rather be on the defense than the prosecution." And I said, "Well, that's a perfect reason for putting you on the prosecution team" because sometimes you have to represent clients that you don't necessarily agree with.

Linda: Well, it teaches them about advocacy.

Steven: Yep.

Linda: And that's what I always try to explain to them. They'll look at the case at first. These cases, they're picked because there's really no winners. Students don't see it that way. They look at it and they go, "You put me on the hard side. I'm never going to win!"

And they and they start to realize, you know, that that's not necessarily true. When you're an advocate, you don't do anything that's wrong, but you can actually find ways to make legitimate arguments for your client because you're an advocate for that position, and it doesn't matter what you think personally. You can start looking at the facts and thinking of different ways those facts can be interpreted. You're not changing the facts. Just changing the narrative. And applying the law, which requires preparation.

Steven: Yes. So after symposium had been doing mock trial for LS101, I would say about 10 or 12 years ago now?

Linda: I'm not sure.

Steven: We joined a national organization called the American Mock Trial Association. There are over 400 colleges and universities around the country, the world, and they have a number of regional competitions. And then some sort of like the NCAA's, where it boils down to a national championship. We got the permission of the academic dean, the committee, to make this a credit earning course.

So there are three credits in the fall semester where we do most of the preparation. Then the regional tournament takes place in February, and it usually ends for us at that point. And they get one credit for participating there. You can take it more than once, and I've had students who've taken it all four years at Lasell. And obviously have gone on to Law school after that.

So I just want to point out some of the highlights of that is that one year we had our regional competition, there was a group of twenty four schools or teams at Boston College, and there are three attorneys for each side.

And one of our students, Rachel Matos, out of a possible 72 student lawyers, placed in the top five scoring of the students who participated and won an award for that.

We've also had a number of students who have gone on to law school after doing the mock trial symposium and in particular, Carrie Kenniston, who was class of 2013 or so, I think. Carrie went on to Suffolk University Law School and was a member of their national championship mock trial team. And I'm happy to say that although I won't be teaching at Lasell next year, Carrie is coming back to Lasell to take over my role as coach of the mock trial team.

We have another student named Frankie Leone, who is an assistant district attorney like Carrie. In East Boston, And I believe he's like the senior attorney for for the ADA's office in that court.

We have others who have gone on to law school.

Linda: Become lawyers.

Steven: Done well.

Lee: So even though we will miss you next year, you'll have wonderful replacements.

Steven: Absolutely.

Lee: We won't miss a beat.

Linda: I'm sure Kerry will be talking to Steve.

Steven: Yes, actually. Kerry also served as a student assistant to me while she was in law school and and she's an ADA now and probably at this point has more trial experience than I do. So I think she's highly qualified. I'm looking forward to seeing how she puts the team together.

Linda: And what I will say is, you know, the legal studies students who go to law school, they are extremely grateful. They're constantly writing to us. We could always call on them to do panels for future students. They always talk of the value they got from learning...mostly that the stand on your feet, the terminology, and say that when they get to law school, they were ahead of the game.

Steven: So. I've had students write to me, "Nobody else in my class knows how to do this." That makes me feel great.

Mock trial and Inter-disciplinarily Skills

Lee: I have heard years ago that a pre-law undergraduate degree is not necessarily the best.

Linda: No, not necessarily. It's skills. But see, that's the key, right? It's skills. It's writing. That's what all employers tell you. I want people who can write. I want people who speak. I want people who work in a team. So what you major in isn't going to make the difference so much. But when you go there, you're ahead of the game because you've been exposed to all those things that typical undergraduates are not. But yes, you could major in anything and go to law school.

Steven: We've had students on the mock trial team who are fashion merchandising majors, sociology.

Linda: Criminal justice.

Steven: Criminal justice, psychology as well as Business. I could go on. I mean, there's no restriction on anybody who wants to take it.

Linda: And in fact, there are students who, in their senior year, I talk to them all time. They realize, you know, I think I might want to go to law school, but never had anything to do with legal study.

Steven: I had a student who had gotten into law school after doing mock trial, and she sent me an email saying that she was at the orientation for her first year of law school class, and a professor asked a question about what to do in a certain situation, and and she said she thought to herself, What would Professor Rosenfeld say? So she said what she thought I would say, and the professor responded, "Well, now you're thinking like a lawyer."

[laughter]

Matt: What strikes me the most is this notion of you create a narrative after interpreting the facts and present it to the jury, and then the jury comes back, and they say something you didn't expect at all. And I think that that is one of the coolest parts of it. Instead of just learning the theory and then maybe applying it to some cases and saying, this is what would happen. You get the surprise of, "I didn't see that coming at all."

Steven: Part of that is because the jurors have more real-life experience than the students.

Linda: Yeah, but it's true in real life, too. You have a case. You see it one way, you think of it this way, you prepare it, you know it inside and out. So then when you present it to this group of people from the community, who know nothing about anything relative to it, you learn from that that you have to put yourself in those folks' shoes and try to explain sometimes very complex things to them.

So again, I think that helps again, even if you're never going to go to law school, it helps with critical thinking, right? It helps when you observe somebody. Are they getting what you're saying? Are you producing the evidence in the correct way? I like to get more involved in more students from other majors. I think a lot of our students maybe don't come because they haven't thought of it that way, with a lot of academic belief in their ability to do certain things. They never see themselves that way.

And so this forces them to look at themselves in another way: “I am able to do that. I'm not limited.”

So, you know, that's valuable no matter where they go from there.

Lee: Well, critical thinking skills are important in anything.

Linda: Exactly.

Steven: And that's why I tell them every year.

Linda: It's so important, and so hard to teach.

Steven: You just see some students come out of their shells. There's students that I've had who -- you don't hear from them in class --

Linda: Ever

Steven: -- and then they get into this project, either the LS101 level or the Practicum level, and suddenly they have ideas, and they're expressing them. Or I've students who are acting as witnesses, and suddenly this dramatic flair comes out that you never saw in class.

Linda: Yeah. And that gives them the confidence because they'll tell you that they do a lot....You know, here at Lasell, you do a lot of presentations as you move on. And this LS101 is often a first year course. Not always. We get people who like have a law and business minor and say, you know, now I'm going to take LS101. The sad thing about that is sometimes they wait till later and then they're like, "Oh, I wish I majored in law!" But that's OK.

It's still a valuable experience for them.

Magic Wand: What would you change about mock trial if you could?

Lee: If you could wave a magic wand and improve one aspect of the mock trial, what would it be and why?

Linda: One of the things I think of all the time -- this is a practical kind of thing; hard for the jurors and for the students -- is that in real trials, one lawyer does all of this. Yes. And here we have to give these little -- so that everyone has a part -- we have to give these little pieces of things to students. And one's cross-examining, and then they're a witness, and it's very confusing for the participants.

Steven: I've told my LS101 students, before you testify or before you ask questions. Say, "Here's my real name, and I'm playing the role of X, and this is what I'm going to be doing." And I print up like a score, you know, score sheet, a program for the jurors so that they know what person is playing what role, and where they fit into the scheme of the trial.

Linda: The good part about that that I do like, and it doesn't always work as well as we'd like but it gets better, is that again, they can't...it's not just their performance. They have to talk to the others, and they have to coordinate. So that's also hard. They need more time to do that. You can do that more in the in the mock trial advance, where they can meet outside a lot and they could work it together because they need to have that consistent theory.

So like if you're you have your set of questions, and you have your theory, and then someone else does the closing argument and it doesn't match...I wish you had more time to do what we could do with that.

Lee: Now, when you go to the mock trial competition, and one student is the prosecutor. Are they the prosecutor for the entire [competition]?

Steven: The thing about the AMTA competition is that each team has to be capable of trying both sides of the case. You don't find out which side you are assigned to try, whether you're the plaintiff or the defendant, until 30 minutes before the trial begins. And there's also this kind of session before the trial begins, where each side announces who their witnesses are going to be.

So, if for any one competition, Lasell's team is going to be the prosecution, we know or we have a general idea one or two of the witnesses that the defense might call, but they might call another defense witness that we really didn't anticipate because they have a different narrative than we did. So we have to be prepared to switch gears and say to have one of the students who is going to be cross-examining a defense witness say, "Well, you may not have prepared for this particular witness, but you know the case well enough, you have to put some cross-examination questions together on the fly."

So listen carefully to what comes out during the direct, and do your cross-examination pretty much, ad-libbing.

Linda: But they do prepare for all of that before they go and compete. And the idea, too, is there's a little more consistency. You'll have an attorney who will do a direct at cross, and then you might have a different attorney do an opening and closing. But there's two attorneys that are working together, just like as if you had a trial with two attorneys working together. So you're not a witness one minute and an, and a, and an attorney the next, which you are in mock trial sometimes in 101.

Matt: So there's a lot of role trading, depending upon the context.

Steven: Yes, it's interesting for the students to hear how another team presents their side of the case because they may say, "Well, gee, that's a really good idea. We should incorporate that into our presentation as well."

Linda: Hence, the fact that we learned with time that the more invitationals and scrimmages we do before we get to the competition, the better we do. So now we've been doing that as well, where they compete against other colleges and these invitations: Brandeis, UNH, UMass.

Steven: Before COVID, we went up to Bowdoin a couple of times, UMass Amherst. I guess getting back to your magic wand, if I had the magic wand, I would have made COVID go away because all the trials took place on Zoom, which is a horrible way to try cases.

Linda: It is.

Steven: It was much more of a real life experience and a bonding experience for the students to travel to other schools or have another school come here for a scrimmage. And they got...they would make connections with those students, which was another great thing about it.

Linda: Sort of like sports, right? Sport has that team thing, and that's what the mock trial experience also does.

Lee: And then in a lot of high schools, there are debate teams. And yeah, it sounds similar to that kind of format.

Linda: Right, right. So at the college level, I mean, I always tell them this even in LS101, because I played the judge now in a million trials, and I was the director of training at Suffolk County DA's office many years ago, so this was part of my job to train my young prosecutors. sometimes these freshmen in LS101 do a nicer job than the lawyer that I actually was training. In the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office!

That for me, is really eye-opening. They learn a lot about preparation in mock trial.

Steven: One of the great things about Lasell, and one of the disadvantages if you can call it that, is that the students who come here, they have so many balls in the air at one time.

They have internships. They have capstone. They’re seniors. They work. Some of them commute.

Linda: Sports sometimes.

Steven: And they're not like some of the teams that the AMTA team competes against from Harvard, where, as I say every year, students on the Harvard team probably came out of the womb wearing a three-piece-suit. So that's one of the great things about Lasell is that it gives those kinds of opportunities.

But we're sort of at a natural disadvantage because there are no divisions in AMTA. Just because of our size. You can have two or three, like we did Texas A&M last year was one of the teams we were against, right? They have like three or four to beat: the A-Team, the B team, the C team.

We just have our one mock trial team.

Lee: One A Team

Summation: Argument & Advocacy

Matt: All right. Did you like to put in a plug for jurors for the end?

Linda: Please. I will start my begging for jurors quite soon, as Lee knows, and there are faculty and staff who wait every year for this. I have to say that about our wonderful community. They love it. They do it time and time again. So we really try to find interesting cases.

Steven: I would also point out that students on the taking the mock trial practicum, who are on the college mock trial team, every year we get some of them to sit on juries because, 1) it's their chance to give some feedback to someone else. And 2) several of them were there to recruit for next year's too.

Linda: Yeah, they can ease their way into it, maybe freshman year, they're just going to be a witness. And then they take it the next year, and so they can move up in terms of being able to develop.

And then from an academic point of view, I remember another administrator when I talked about mock trial, she said to me, You know, our students, when they come here, they maybe haven't developed yet an academic identity. So this kind of experience enhances their view of themselves as academics. This brings them to that level and gives them some academic belief in themselves. Because they see a short term accomplishment for that period, for that class. They, if they didn't come to college, they wouldn't have gotten that, you know.

Lee: It also sounds like a good course for students who come here undeclared.

Linda: Yeah, yeah, that's changed a little bit because we've changed the core. LS101 was a choice they could have had for the KP [Knowledge Perspectives]. And so we would get a lot of undeclares who would take the individuals in society KP at LS101. It's a little harder now because they take they all take SOC104.

But I talked to undeclareds, like I did at Lasell Day here. A good way to be an undeclared is to try all these different things to see where you fit.

Steven: It's been a pleasure teaching both levels to LS101 level, to the mock trial level. It really is gratifying, to me anyway, to see students progress from one stage to the next, and then some of them on to law school or other careers.

One last thing I would say is that the mock trial practicum to create the mock trial team, we have an advantage for students in that larger schools there are tryouts for the work trial. And you get rejected or placed on team C or something like that. And here, they're all welcome.

Matt: Well, that's the goal.

Lee: Just like a proposal at symposium!

Linda: Exactly.

Matt: Full circle.

Linda: So if I had a magic wand, one of the magic wand things would be I need a bigger pool to recruit from, of students in general. I mean, you know, we're small, and actually pre-law is not big at any school, even big schools. How many times have you had somebody who wants law in business? They realize in their junior year they could fit that in because they have a few business courses. So take a few law. And now we're like, they're like, "We want to be on the mock trial team, and they're graduating! We had two or three of them, right?!"

Steven: Freshmen and sophomores, and then students come in as seniors.

Lee: Well, because of TV and movies, we all think of criminal trials, but there is entertainment law...

Linda: Oh my god. I was just talking about this this weekend at Lasell Day. I was telling them, the way I've come at it all these years now is "advocacy." A lawyer is an advocate, and all... everything needs advocates, right? Education has lawyers, and business has lawyers. And, and trial practice is really a small subset of advocacy.

And I told my students, you know, I know lawyers who haven't been inside a courtroom in 20 or 30 years. Or at all, except when they were in law school.

Matt: So it helps define it too as well. For people who might interpret, being a lawyer as just what they know from Law and Order or from a very Perry Mason where he goes up on stage and he makes a person confess. And there you go.

Linda: The key things are making an argument and having valuable evidence other than your opinion to establish that argument. That's what we try to tell them. Like everything that you argue or say must be based on evidence. You know, that's a skill too, like when you're making a speech at a business thing, you can't just say, "Well, I think it's this." Well, "Here's what the data says, right? And in law, it's here's what the law says, and this is the evidence I have for that law."

And you can find the evidence, you can develop the evidence, you're not creating the evidence, but you're using it to make your arguments on behalf of your client.

Steven: The witness will never confess on the stand. You know, certainly not in our competitions. You have to win on points, not by a knockout. That's where all of the use of the facts comes in.

Linda: Actually, what I find so interesting is you can take a case, even as a real lawyer, right? You look at it and you're like, Oh, I remember as a prosecutor, I would say "This case is terrible. Oh my God, I don't have a chance in Hell.”

And by the time I finished working it and I got to the jury and I argued the case, I started to think, "Well, you know, I'm going to win this case," and then if I lose, I'm like, "You forgot that that case didn't have great facts to begin with!"

But it's not because I created the facts, it's just because that's our system. So, you're an advocate for another person.

Matt: Well, alright. Thank you so much for coming to talk with us today about mock trial and about the history of it and about the applications of it, and the learning that happens through it, and thank you so much for everything that you've done for Lasell.

Steven: Well, thank you.

Linda: Thank you.

Lee: Thanks.

Matt: Thanks so much for listening to us, everybody. Faculty interested in learning more about teaching and learning here at Lasell can visit MyLasell at https://my.lasell.edu

Or you can send us an email at TLC@lasell.edu, or give us a call. 617-243-2001. Creative Commons Music by Jason Shah on Audionautix.com.

See you later!