Hey Mom: I’m Being Taught by a ’57 Chevy

Students at Culver City High School are learning about the law in an unusual educational project sponsored by the Constitutional Rights Foundation and the Beverly Hills Bar Assn.

It is rare enough that high school students are offered classes about legal principles, but what makes this project even more interesting is the “vehicle” being used to teach the law: a 1957 blue Chevy.

Attorney Louis M. Brown, 80, first had the idea for the course nearly 30 years ago, when his children were in high school.

“I said to myself, anybody can teach all of the law that a high school youngster can possibly absorb using the automobile as the central theme.”

Brown, who helped pioneer the preventive law movement and who is the author of several legal books, wrote an outline for a textbook based on his idea, but he couldn’t attract any interest among publishers. So the idea sat in the back of his mind until last year, when he found himself next to Kathryn Ballsun, the new president of the Beverly Hills Bar Assn., at a luncheon in his honor. He mentioned the idea to her, and as he puts it, she “went running with it.”

The 10-week, one-day-a-week course, taught by several volunteer attorneys, began at Culver City High School in February and will move to Santa Monica High School this month.

Ballsun says her goal is for school districts across the country to pick up the idea.

The curriculum uses the purchase, repair and operation of a blue ’57 Chevy to illustrate these legal concepts: basic legal rights (the right to own property, to seek redress through the courts); contract law (the purchase of a car is a contract); automobile insurance; consumer rights (lemon laws, repairs), and criminal law (tickets, arrest).

“The students love it,” Ballsun says. “The law becomes something living and vital for them, rather than abstract principles.

“Our goal,” she continues, “is to expose high school students in a positive way to the concept of laws and how important they are in their daily lives.”

The handouts given each student at the beginning of the course demonstrate the pervasive impact the law can have on even a high school student. Included are an automobile purchase agreement, a manufacturer’s warranty, a loan and security agreement (this allows the bank to repossess the car if you don’t pay your car payment), a traffic ticket form, and a criminal complaint (the legal document that sets forth the crime with which a defendant is charged).

And, no matter what your age, you’d be doing pretty well if you could understand all that.