Back when I was trying cases regularly, I developed a little courtroom hobby. Police officers would take the stand and slip into what I can only describe as cop speak. Something happens when someone sits in the witness chair and suddenly every ordinary human verb in the English language becomes… robotic. “Upon surveillance, I observed
I teach torts to our 1L classes. In the exam I gave last fall, I posed a NextGen bar exam style question in which I invented a criminal statute relevant to the fact scenario and summarized the statute in about one sentence. However, I never gave my students the text of the statute. The text
We teach in classrooms and mock trial courtrooms, talking to and sometimes with our students and then making them speak and demonstrate skills. But I suspect that many of us don’t have the time in our syllabuses to add a “let’s go to court” requirement. Some recent research suggests that we should. But before we
We are exiting a season strong with signals. Christmas lights on snow covered houses. Lit trees sparkling behind windows that are shuttered or draped for the other 11 months of the year. The luminous march of Menorah lights on an 8-day trek. The tinkling drone of Salvation Army bells coming and going on winter winds.
In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, there is a climactic confrontation between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, in which Vader corners Luke and tells him, “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” Luke shouts back that Obi-Wan told him Vader killed his father. Then, Vader pauses. A long, deliberate silence. This silence
As much as I wish to resist it, the pull toward artificial intelligence becomes stronger every day. And as experiments proceed with LLMs (large language models) it may be easier to have AI ‘converse’ with humans, respond to the humans’ concerns, and ultimately change the humans’ beliefs. A recent series of experiments tested this –
“When I was looking out of the airplane’s window that I took when I first left home to college, I had tears in my eyes.” This was the first sentence in a short story I wrote in college. Picture it: someone sitting by the window, quiet, eyes filled with tears as the plane moves forward.
If I were a true believer in the power of unanswered rhetorical questions the rest of this column would be blank. Or maybe not; because maybe the power of the question comes when it follows compelling information that guides the audience to the desired response. So – let me provide the information and then see
A big chunk of our community just returned from Stetson’s Educating Advocacy Teachers (EATS) conference. If you have never been, you should go. I feel sad when I leave the conference but there is also another feeling I easily find within me. I leave feeling inspired. And because I left EATS feeling inspired, I decided
A new publication from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, NACDL – THE BIAS BOOK – UNPACKING BIAS IN THE CRIMINAL LEGAL SYSTEM – had a curious segment on “proxemics.” Written by Texas practitioner Mimi Coffey, it had a provocative title – “Unjust Courtroom Practices: Always Seating The Prosecution Closest To The Jury.” Coffey