By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: From readers of this blog, I sometimes hear, “I don’t always agree with you, but I always find you worth reading.” That is one of my favorite compliments, because of, and not despite, the disagreement. It wouldn’t be that interesting, after all, to stick with what everyone agrees on. Learning comes
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Earlier this week, I wrote about winning and losing with dignity. For this post, I want to take a closer look at the potential flip side of that. In the days since the close state elections reached an apparently clear result for Joe Biden as the new President-Elect, the Trump
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: After a tense few days of states counting votes while the public kept refreshing the CNN map, the 2020 Presidential Election has finally been called. And at least in the initial aftermath, we have seen starkly different responses from President-Elect Biden and President Trump. As the victory emerged from Pennsylvania
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: The 2020 election seems to be nearing the end of the vote-counting phase, with the final ballots in Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania being tallied as I write. But one clear loser is already evident: the preelection polls. Public opinion estimates that showed Joe Biden with a commanding lead, even in
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: On the eve of the final voting day in the 2020 election, it feels like the calm before the storm. As divided as Americans are in these times, there are a few beliefs that everyone seems to share: Their candidate is ahead where it counts. Their candidate is generally popular,
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Trial lawyers work in words: language that is precise, economical, and influential. Those words are the water that litigators swim in, and for that reason, the absence of words can be a little uncomfortable. That can be an obstacle to using one effective technique in a variety of settings. That
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: A couple of months ago, I helped to run the Online Courtroom Project’s demonstration jury trial using Zoom. Like a number of other experiments and actual trials going forward across the country, jurors showed up via laptop and camera to view voir dire, openings, witnesses, closings, and instructions, then moved to
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: These are stressful times, and there are many reasons to expect that your jury pool in the near future is going to be a little stressed out. In the article, “The Pandemic Juror,” (Wilson 2020) a University of Tennessee law professor noted what many of us have observed: Jurors who
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: The Reptile approach of trying plaintiffs’ cases by framing them in terms of personal safety is no longer a new idea. Plaintiffs’ attorneys are also less likely to treat that approach as a cure-all in every trial. But the Reptile’s themes and techniques are still there, having snaked their way
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: It has been a tough year for science. On the social-science front, it seems that we have entered a phase where no one believes the polls. To conservative Trump supporters, the consensus of data showing the President well behind his Democratic challenger, even in Trump’s must-win swing states, just reflects
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