I have long been interested in the educational value of studying lawmaking. To help students understand how law is both a product and a process–created through disputes, negotiations, and compromises among multiple actors with different interests–I developed Learning Law by Making It: The Case of the Nationality Act (published in the Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology (TRAILS) in 2025). In this two-week simulation, students work in groups representing imaginary countries. Each student is assigned a role—such as legislator, bureaucrat, judge, or citizen—to draft a Nationality Act, which determines who belongs to the national community (e.g., naturalization, citizenship, etc.). As they respond to fictional scenarios and revise their proposals through multiple rounds of deliberation, negotiation, and feedback, each group ultimately produces the final version of the Act.

Having implemented this activity in SOCI 175: Nationality and Citizenship, a remote seminar with six students during the 2026 Summer Session at UC San Diego, I reflect on how it can be further refined and why engaging students in the process of lawmaking offers a valuable sociological approach to studying law. 

1. Collaboration Requires Both Structure and Flexibility

Facilitating discussion is challenging, especially when students must collaboratively draft legislation. Initially, I focused on providing detailed interactional guidance, such as assigning discussion leaders, structuring tasks, and even suggesting icebreaker topics. Yet, it is also important to reassure students that there is no single correct way to collaborate. Feeling awkward, uncertain, or lost is not a sign of failure but a natural part of learning to negotiate, compromise, and build consensus. In developing this activity, I focused primarily on providing “hard” guidelines, but my classroom experience revealed the importance of offering more “soft” feedback. In future iterations, I will make this expectation explicit alongside the practical guidance.

2. Capturing Diverse Actors and Interests in Lawmaking

Each student in the group was assigned a role such as legislator, judge, bureaucrat, or ordinary citizen. Although these broad categories provided a useful starting point, as I delved more deeply into my own research on the Nationality Act, I realized that they masked important differences within each group. For example, within the category of bureaucrats, officials from the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Employment and Labor may pursue distinct organizational interests and advocate different approaches to citizenship law. Future versions of the activity will therefore distinguish these actors more explicitly.

This experience clearly suggests that educators must remain attentive to their own research on the particular laws and policies they teach to capture the diverse actors and interests that shape their development when designing classroom activities, teaching materials, and assignments centered on law or policy.

3. How Historical Context Shapes Lawmaking

Each group represents an imaginary country with a distinct historical context. Some countries are prosperous and influential, while others have only recently gained independence and face significant political and economic challenges. Students must draft and revise their Nationality Act considering these circumstances.

This component illustrates a core sociological insight: human behavior is shaped and constrained by social structures while still allowing room for agency, creativity, and innovation. Recognizing this relationship between structure and agency is central to the sociological imagination. To strengthen this aspect of the activity, I plan to develop more detailed and diverse fictional scenarios than the current version to help students more fully imagine their assigned contexts and encourage them to evaluate collectively whether the laws they produce are realistically grounded in those historical contexts rather than drafted arbitrarily.

The beauty of sociology lies in seeing the complexity and diversity of the people, ideas, and forces embedded in social phenomena. Allowing students to become part of that complexity by simulating the lawmaking process helps them better appreciate it.

Jinhyuk Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He is a scholar of political sociology, international migration, and law and society. His current research examines the development of South Korea’s Nationality Act in the twenty-first century, as well as how Korean diasporas transnationally navigate, strategize, and (re)imagine their nationalities as both legal and symbolic statuses within a changing legal structure.