The Issue of Commensurability: Understanding Jury Research and Juror Information Processing

Overview: Perhaps it is a truism by now, but understanding people and how they think and interact in their social environment is not rocket science. It is much more difficult than rocket science because the thing being measured need not follow any immutable laws. In fact, measuring people and understanding how and why they reach the conclusions they do is made all the more difficult because they frequently cannot tell one how and why they got there themselves. The task is made even more difficult when applied to juries because the task is no longer to understand one person, but several people, as well as the interactions among them. The task itself will never be easy, but trained litigation strategists employ several techniques to increase the confidence associated with drawing conclusions about the underlying process for the person and the group. One important technique in this process is to focus on juror and issue commensurability. Jury research is really the first step in discovering how to create a case story, which produces pathways through which jurors can find for the client. The process of jury research also allows us to identify what strategies are actually serving to create or connect issue-areas for our opponent.

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Format: HTML | Date: Jan 2003 | Pages: 1