Founded 2009 Location Washington, D.C. | Focus Civic-Education Method Technological | |
Founder Josh Blackman, Yaakov Roth Area served Worldwide, with focus on the United States | ||
The Harlan Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is "to bring a stylized law school experience into the high school classroom to ensure that our next generation of leaders has a proper understanding of our most fundamental laws." The primary focus of the Harlan Institute is on the study of the Supreme Court of the United States and on constitutional law. The Institute's primary means of supplying legal education to a high school audience is through FantasySCOTUS, a program devoted to giving high schoolers a free way to predict "real cases that the students will read in the news."
Contents
The Harlan Institute is a partner of iCivics, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's civics-initiative.
Programs
The Harlan Institute offers, and is developing, several programs to educators throughout the world.
FantasySCOTUS.org
FantasySCOTUS was launched in fall of 2010 and is a spinoff of the highly-popular legal game, FantasySCOTUS.net. FantasySCOTUS.org is a free educational tool designed to allow educators to immerse their students in Supreme Court law. Students predict which way the 9 Supreme Court Justices will rule on five different cases that are scheduled to be heard that year.
Cases for October Term 2010 include:
Classes earn points for correctly predicting the outcome of each case and can earn additional points through blogging on various topics and earning "fantasy badges."
Reception
FantasySCOTUS.org has been received well by students and educators, as well as by the national media. Students have called the program "the future of social studies education in America." Educators have noted that the program is "indispensable to the We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution competition," and that "students are engaged to see how the Supreme Court impacts their lives."
The program has been received well in the media, with reports in outlets such as the New York Times, the National Law Journal, the Roanoke Times, and CNN, among others.
The program has been called "the hottest new fantasy-league game," and an "interactive hands-on nationwide competition."
HARLANconnect
HARLANconnect is a virtual education outreach program designed by the Harlan Institute in order to allow lawyers and legal experts to teach high school and middle school classes about the Constitution and the Supreme Court. Lectures are organized by the Harlan Institute with the help of volunteers who are then matched with classes requesting mentors. Lectures are done via Skype.
The first "SCOTUS-Skype Teach-A-Thon" was held on November 11, 2010 and involved mentors from across the United States and involved legal experts such as the Harlan Institute's President, Josh Blackman, and the Cato Institute's Ilya Shapiro, among others. Classes were spread across 6 states in the United States and 1 province in Canada.
YourConstitution.net
The Harlan Institute is planning YourConstitution.net, an "interactive website will take the reader through a visual tour of some of the most famous landmark Supreme Court cases," planned for release in 2011.