Penn State Dickinson Law Dickinson Law IDEAS Faculty Scholarly Works Faculty Scholarship Fall 2001 Reality Programming Lessons for Twenty-First Century Trial Lawyering Gary S. Gildin
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ideas.dickinsonlaw.psu.edu/fac-works Recommended Citation Gary S. Gildin, Reality Programming Lessons for Twenty-First Century Trial Lawyering, 31 Stetson L. Rev. 61 (2001). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Dickinson Law IDEAS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarly Works by an authorized administrator of Dickinson Law IDEAS. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. REALITY PROGRAMMING LESSONS FOR TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY TRIAL LAWYERING Gary S. Gildin* I. WHY SHO ULD WE CARE ABOUT THE ARRIVAL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY? When I told my cousin-in-law Gary Ruben, a lawyer in Chicago, that I had agreed to write an article for a Symposium on trial advocacy in the twenty-first century, he responded incredulously, "We are supposed to be doing something different than trying to make a jury understand what happened and be persuaded by our version of the events?" Well, Gary, in one sense you are absolutely correct to be skeptical because the objectives of trial advocacy that you described have remained immutable, regardless of the century. However, two interrelated changes are occurring as we enter the new millennium that must affect the way trial lawyers present their cases to the jury - the evolution in the demographics of the jury pool and the revolution in technology that has transformed how our new breed of juror receives and is presented out-of-court informa- tion.