From pink soccer cleats to pink cupcakes

As an adult, I've spent a lot of hours on soccer fields.  Both of my kids have played recreational soccer.  Much to my surprise, I've taken a soccer class and I've assisant coached my son's soccer team.  Little did I know that being on a soccer field would lead me to a great job!

Physics, Swimming Pools, Manholes, Contracts, Cats and Pink Cupcakes

My Personal Labor Journal   © 2011 Julie Shubin

George Mason University:  From the soccer field to the classroom, cats and pink cupcakes

While at a soccer field waiting for my daughter’s practice to end, my friend, Laura Poms, who teaches at GMU suggested that I look into teaching law classes for the School of Management.    For the last four years, I’ve taught numerous sections of Bule 302, The Legal Environment of Business, a survey class of legal topics impacting business – such as torts, criminal law, constitutional law, administrative law, and contracts.  For the past three semesters, I’ve also taught Bule 402, Commercial Law, an upper level elective class covering contract law, the Uniform Commercial Code, and other topics such as property law, ownership and risk, and securities law.

Bule 302 is really fun for me to teach because it gives students an introduction to the basic legal topics that all law students study, and it covers many areas of law that I’ve had the opportunity to practice during my legal career. 

When I was asked to teach Commercial Law, I remembered my Commercial Law professor asking, “Did you know that you could write a check on a napkin?”  I thought how much fun it would be to get to teach my students that checks actually have been written on items ranging from napkins to cows to underpants, and then explaining that while the law does not prohibit such acts, customer agreements with banks now preclude this “historic” practice. 

Bule 402 is a challenging class to teach because it involves the sometimes arcane and boring details of contract law, the Uniform Commercial Code, and some other dry topics.  That requires a lot of professorial effort to make it interesting.   I was very touched when one of my most recent students said “Law and the like may not be the most exciting of courses to teach so it is what it is in terms of material, but Professor Shubin didn't make it seem that way. I came to class always excited to learn, so I thank her for that.”  

I may be known on campus as the crazy cat professor.  During my first semester teaching, my cat, Henry, fell asleep on top of my textbook.  I snapped his picture and used in my PowerPoint slides on my first day of class as an icebreaker and a reminder to the students to “use” their textbooks.  Since then, I’ve continued to use a “cat of the day” slide to help students remember a legal topic.  For instance, to make the point that a contract is a promise, I use a slide showing a picture of one of the feral campus cats as an illustration of the Mason Cat Coalition’s “promise” or “contract” to take care of those cats.   My use of cats to help teach lessons at GMU was most recently noted in an article about Advocacy and Rescue, by Dusty Rainbolt, June 2011 Cat Fancy magazine.

In both of the Bule classes, I use a hypothetical business, The Pink Cupcake, to help students understand how laws and legal issues affect a business.  We cover topics from writing a contract for winter plowing services for The Pink Cupcake (a basic contract that a real local business would need) to ownership, insurance, and risk factors when The Pink Cupcake orders a shipment of cherries from an out-of-state farm. 

For now, part six of my personal labor journal is the last installment.  As I posted a few weeks ago, I'm not teaching this semester, but hope to get back in the queue.  What's next?  I don't know.  Many of my students have asked if I will open a pink cupcake bakery.  Well, I did bake a great banana bread this weekend that could easily be turned into cupcakes!