By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: On the 170th Christmas after the publication of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, we finally have a diagnosis: Ebenezer Scrooge suffered from “affluenza.” That condition has surfaced most recently in the case of a well-off Fort Worth teenager who received probation and treatment, instead of a prison sentence for causing the deaths of four
Watch Out For Scrooge Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: The Grand Old Party is putting a brand new emphasis on appealing to the female voter, even to the point of creating a course on how to speak to and run against women. This comes in the response to recent polling showing a gender gap in party support, and in the
Speak to the Person, Not the Gender Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Okay, let’s line up: Emotional people on the right, logical people on the left. Where would you line up? Too simple? Turns out it is. The idea of classing people in broad categories like emotional/logical, creative/analytic, or “left-brained”/”right-brained” is a staple of folk psychology commonly applied to the task of
Stop Trying to Adapt to ‘Left-‘ or ‘Right-Brained’ Jurors Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: What do scholastic debaters do after they graduate? Based on my own social circle, they either teach others to be debaters, or they become litigators. It is by no means a universal prerequisite, but it is common enough that within any gathering of trial lawyers, at least some of them,
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: In a recent post, I wrote about a jury’s reason for decision, as well as the formal and informal ways of finding that out. In response, a reader raised a very important issue. “Jurors are only going to tell you what they consciously think are the reasons for their decision,”
Dig Deeper When Interviewing Jurors Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: There is the solemn moment when the jury returns to the courtroom, delivers the verdict, and then everyone is done. But often, it is with one question left hanging in the air: Why? Whether you’ve won or lost, or something in-between, there is a very human drive to know the
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Many legal cases involve probability. The known risks of a medical condition affect liability. The chances of the same occurrence without the defendant’s actions affect causation. The likelihood that a defendant would earn a given income if an accident hadn’t happened affects damages. Litigators might take for granted that the
Think Your Jury Understands Probability? Don’t Bet on It Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Remember the list of fallacies? For many of us, it might fall in the category of things we learned at one point in our lives, probably in a logic or communication class, and then mostly set aside in our practical lives. After all, it can seem a little pedantic, or
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Lawyers and expert witnesses might be used to thinking of science as just one way among many of proving something: When you need to demonstrate a fact at an empirical level, commission an expert, do a study, and report the results. But there may be more to it than that.
Convey the Morality of Your Science Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Last Tuesday saw something remarkable. A man armed with an assault rifle and several other weapons entered an Atlanta area elementary school and there was every indication the situation could’ve had fatal consequences for many of the 800 kindergarten through fifth grade students, for school staff and teachers, for law