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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: The instructions for jurors are clear: They are to take an issue that has no effect on them, listen dispassionately to the evidence and arguments, apply the facts to the law, and make a decision. That is the model, but in reality other motivations creep in. In talking with jurors in mock […]

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Right off the top, I want to make clear that none of the tips involve starting off your ending with, “In conclusion….” I have always disliked that phrase, and put it in a category — along with phrases like “As I said before…” or “To be honest…” — that make

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: With Zoom now as common as email, we can find ourselves inhabiting the four corners of a glowing screen more often than we’re inhabiting an actual office or meeting room. Status calls, strategy meetings, witness preparation sessions, and even hearings and parts of trials are taking place via video-conference. While

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Consider Rodin’s “Thinker” — The sculptured image of the solitary and self-contained individual engaged in what we take to be humanity’s sine qua non: independent thought. It is inspiring, but it is also an idealization. The more carefully we think about thought itself, the less truly independent it turns out to be.

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Before a recent jury selection, I was digging through a stack of juror questionnaires and social media results when something we’ve been seeing for awhile came into clearer view: The conservatives in the pool were falling into some strikingly different camps. More specifically, some were the traditional pro-law, pro-institution, pro-corporation tight Republican

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Maybe a named party to a case settled out before trial, maybe they’re immune from suit, or maybe they were handled during a different part of the process — but all the jurors know is that a missing party might be partially at fault, and they aren’t there in the

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: If we rewind to about two years ago, as we were getting confirmations of a novel virus in China, few of us at the time would have had the imagination to envision the scope of disruption and devastation that would follow in what is, for now, the next two years. The

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: In liability cases against physicians and other professionals, the plaintiffs work very hard to frame liability as a clear cut-and-dried mistake: The professional did something that wasn’t allowed, or failed to do something that was required. The simplicity of this approach, enshrined in the “Reptile” and “Rules of the Road”

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm Jurors are often put in the position of assessing the probability or risk of something at the time a decision was made, before the consequences can be known. “How likely is it that a given result will be the outcome from a behavior?” is a rational question, and there may

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Courts over the past year and a half have moved with unprecedented speed into unorthodox territory, exploring ways to conduct trials, or portions of trials, via remote videoconferencing technology. In that setting, perhaps it was only a matter of time before a case would be overturned on appeal due to