By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: A few days ago, after the National Rifle Association got wind of a new issue of Annals of Internal Medicine which included several articles on gun control, the organization tweeted back at the doctors: “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane.” Once various other conservative commentators jumped aboard, the […]
Stay in Your Lane (But Own That Lane) Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: You know how the joke begins: “A guy walks into a bar…” But wait, for you to know the punch line, this has to be past tense. So wouldn’t it be, “A guy walked into a bar…?” It could be. But usually it is “walks” – present tense. Why? Because
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: As our team was conducting a recent social media analysis on a jury pool, one particular potential juror stood out. He was, as he proudly proclaimed in his public online messages, a “flat-earther.” And this belief of his, that we live on a flat plane rather than on a globe,
See the Threads of Conspiracy Thinking Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: How do humans assess large sets of evidence? We start by simplifying and internally summarizing. One of the main ways we do that is to boil the information down to a limited number categories, usually two. For example, let’s say you’re trying to assess the health effects of a glass
Understand the Binary Bias Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Experts have a tough job translating sometimes technical detail to lay audiences and working closely with a party to the litigation while still maintaining the role of “teacher” rather than “advocate.” Some excellent and wide-ranging advice on how to thread that needle comes in the form of a couple of
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: A newly-published study about the effects of voir dire in capital cases suggests that social scientists and the courts may need to reconsider a long-held tenet. For at least the past 35 years, the belief has been that jurors exposed to the process of jury selection in capital cases, known as
Voir Dire: Account for Both Presumptions and Expectations Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: It is almost election time again. But the normally low-turnout midterm may not be in the cards this time around, owing to the outrage on both sides of the political spectrum. And some believe that it’s a shame that we have these levels of moral outrage: It diminishes our civility
Consider the Upside of Outrage Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: I think it is now possible to divide the #MeToo movement, so far, into two phases: Pre-Kavanaugh and Post-Kavanaugh. The cultural phenomenon of women stepping up to hold sexual harassers and abusers accountable has hit a roadblock. If the charges against Harvey Weinstein was the movement’s Battle of Austerlitz, then
React to the #MeToo and #HimToo Scripts Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: It is one of those factors of advocacy that is understood at a basic level, but not practiced at an effective level: Structure. Whenever you are verbally presenting — opening statement, closing argument, oral argument, CLE’s — organize your content into clear and discrete main points. Litigators know that, of
Make It Chunky: Eight Best Practices for a Structure that Sticks Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Jurors and judges sometimes need to understand testimony regarding probability. For a criminal jury, maybe that probability relates to the chances of a false-positive on DNA identification. In a products case, maybe it concerns a failure rate. In an employment discrimination class action, it may relate to differing hiring percentages. And
Explaining Probability? Use Frequencies Rather Than Percentages Read More »