Crossing the Threshold with Apples, Potatoes, and Limes

Abstract

The Grocer’s Dilemma is a legal writing (and thinking) assignment that can help undergraduate students interested in law school as well as first-year law students beginning their legal study better understand how legal rules are not fixed but are instead malleable—uncertain, flexible, and somewhat indeterminate.  It asks students to consider, based on a grocer’s preference, where to place produce inside a grocery store.  In this process, students must consider “precedents”—other produce—that contribute to the rule. Those precedents, however, do not have a fixed meaning.  Instead, their meaning is malleable.  Malleability is a threshold concept in the law.  As such, when students become aware of and more comfortable with the concept of malleability, they can begin moving through the liminality of legal education and begin their journey across the threshold between legal novice and lawyer-expert.  The Grocer’s Dilemma assignment focuses students on a nonlegal context for examining malleability, making it easier for students to focus on the complexities of reasoning about a malleable rule rather than the legal rules themselves.