Day 26

Today I had class at 9:50 am. The class subject is international law. I taught about international business transactions. Those transactions discussed today included the common law relationship between sellers and buyers of international goods. I wanted to try and explain the difficulties and inefficiencies of litigating international trade disputes and shed some light on the role of the WTO and other trade organizations in the regard. I discussed background for the first 40 minutes. Then I had some of the students come up to the front of class and role play seller, shippers, buyer, US judge, China judge, WTO organization, and lawyers for each party. I think it went well, I saw some looks of understanding and the students generally acted like the real parties would. We had one ship lost at sea, later discovered to have escaped and stolen the goods. We had one reliable shipper (carrier), and the WTO generally didn't help anyone. The expense of litigation was more expensive than the goods, and I made the shippers take out insurance at the advice of their attorney.

In the end, the shipper bore the risk of loss, and the buyer recouped his goods from a second shipment, that arrived. It was great, my buyer even rejected a shipment as nonconforming goods! He did it on his own, that was great. A lot of what I do is give them the English tools to relate what they already know about international law. In some cases I give them something new to chew on.