Bias

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Everyone has known one: A colleague or an adversary who uses anger as a communication strategy. Through aggressive words, shouting, or other group dominance behaviors, that person is able to get some (sometimes grudging) compliance from the rest of the group. And, more likely than not, that person is male. […]

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: When we think about racial bias in the legal process, our first thought is likely to be of charging and sentencing in the criminal justice system, or based on the Black Lives Matter movement of recent times, we might think of interactions with law enforcement officers. Based on an innovative

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Once during oral voir dire in a commercial case, I listened as one potential juror noted his cynicism toward the civil trial process. “Rich people fighting over money,” he said. While that particular venire member may have been angling for a strike, and definitely received one, the comment does speak

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Another mass shooting at a school, this time at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.  Another isolated and disturbed gun collector, and another set of victims to be remembered: nine in this case. In President Obama’s remarks, we see increasing frustration as he spoke of “more American families — moms, dads, children —

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: What a difference a little bit of time can make. In 1996, same-sex marriage was more likely to be the punchline of a joke than a serious policy position, and support hovered at just 26 percent of the American public. By the time the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell this

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: As of posting time, seven African-American churches have burned down since the racially motivated murders in Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina two weeks ago. One of those fires may have been caused by lightning, but there’s a concern that others may have been caused by a belief – namely,

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: The idea of the corporate personhood is typically thought of as a “legal fiction” (Schane, 1987). That is, we treat a nonperson as a person so that it makes sense legally to talk about corporate entities doing what people would otherwise do: buying and selling, entering contracts, suing and being

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: It’s one of those sort of things where, once you know what it is, you’ll see it everywhere. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the research-proven tendency for those who aren’t very good at something to carry an inflated view of their own abilities, because they aren’t quite capable enough to understand their