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5.1 - Lecture
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En provenance du cours de Yale University
A Law Student's Toolkit
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À partir de la leçon
Evidentiary Tools
Concepts from the law of evidence that can help you respond to questions and make compelling arguments
Rencontrer les enseignants
Ian AyresWilliam K. Townsend Professor
Yale Law School
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To be responsive simply means to answer the question that was asked.
It sounds simple, but a surprising number of people from presidential
candidates to loved one fail at this simple task.
For example, consider the question did you eat the last piece of cake?
Followed by the answer, that's ridiculous.
I hate cake.
The answer is non-responsive.
It's a non-responsive response because it
doesn't explicitly answer the question that was asked.
The same answer would have been fine if had simply begun with the word no.
No that's ridiculous, I hate cake.
To be responsive doesn't mean that you have to limit your answer to the minimum
number of syllables possible.
Although there's something beautifully clean at times
in having a monosyllabic yes or no.
Being responsive also doesn't mean that you have to know the correct answer to
all questions.
It's a supremely responsive answer
to a yes no question to say, I don't know or it depends.
Although if you say it depends,
you should be prepared to be asked the follow up, it depends on what.
To be responsive you need to first develop the skill of carefully listening
to the question that is being asked.
Is the question calling for an open ended list of reasons?
Or is it asking you to choose among a limited set of possible answers?
By the way, I find that some professors have very different mixtures of what
proportion of open ended versus what proportion of yes no questions they ask.
Once you have identified what's being asked,
the second skill is to begin your answer with the requested information.
Beginning with the requested response helps the questioner
by providing the information that the questioner is waiting to hear
before going on to provide other types of information.
In casual conversation, being responsive is a way of showing respect.
Too many people are non-responsive because they think
they really know what the questioner's deeper question is.
For example, consider the question.
Is there still a piece of cake in the refrigerator?
Answer.
You wouldn't want to eat that cake, it tastes terrible.
The respondent ignored the question assuming that the questioner was
interested in eating the last piece of cake.
But it's possible that the questioner wanted to know about the cakes possible
absent to figure out whether a child was inappropriately eating between meals.
You dishonor your questioner when you ignore a question because you think
the questioner asked the wrong question.
It's so much easier to answer, yes, but you wouldn't want to eat it.
Being responsive isn't just a good idea it's the law.
Witnesses are enjoined to be responsive when giving testimony.
A classic moment of trial advocacy is for
a counsel during cross examination to intone, objection,
non-responsive, move to strike.
Your honor, please instruct the witness to just answer the question.
Indeed, while it is fine in class or conversation to
supplement your responsive answer with additional information, counsel can and
do limit testimony to the more monosyllabic variety.
A counsel might say, just answer the question yes or no.
Did you wait two hours before calling the police?
So, you should strive to not just develop the skill of yourself being responsive,
you should develop the ability to notice when other people aren't being responsive.
Good lawyers hear a figurative buzzer go off in their heads
when they hear someone fail to respond to a question.
Practicing with your fellow students is a great place to start.
My kids, when they were young, picked up this knack and
are keenly attuned to my failings in this regard.
Taking great glee in catching me by pointing out objection,
non-responsive daddy.
Responsiveness is also important in addressing the court at trial or
an appellate advocacy.
In the very first supreme court all of argument that I ever attended,
Wygant versus Jackson Board of Education, I heard Justice O'Connor having
to repeatedly asked the respondent to articulate what the state's
compelling interest was for race conscious employment practice was.
After the third try she said with exasperation quote,
maybe I can't get an answer, but
I'd really would like to know what the compelling state interest is, unquote.
Antagonizing the judiciary is not the best way to further your client's interests.
Non-responsiveness played a small role in spurring me to organize
a class action lawsuit against Yale University in 1984.
It was in the fall semester of my second year when law school services
were massively disrupted by a strike of clerical and maintenance workers.
And I attended a town hall meeting in the law school's largest auditorium,
where an associate dean explained that the school would be issuing
rebates to students with meal contracts for every week the strike lasted.
I asked the dean who calculated the amount of the weekly dining hall rebate.
The dean responded, oh, it's just the prorated amount of what you paid.
To which I said, non-responsive, but is it your view that the seller,
in breach, is allowed to unilaterally determine the amount of damages or
that those damages are normally equal to a pro-rata return of the price paid?
The lawsuit might never been filed if the dean had answered my initial who question.
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