Symposia
Summers-Wyatt Symposium
The Center hosts the Summers-Wyatt Symposium, which focuses on issues related to the right to jury trial and the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. The Symposium seeks to attract work from legal scholars as well as from social scientists, communication experts, and professionals from other disciplines. These works along with the Symposium proceedings are published each spring in the Center’s annual Symposium edition in conjunction with the Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy.
In 2008, the law firm of Summers-Wyatt created an endowment which, among other things, allowed the Center for Advocacy and Dispute Resolution to host seminars and symposia focusing on the right to trial by jury in the United States. This year's symposium will be held on March 27th, 2009, and will focus on jury trials in civil cases.
Summers--Wyatt Symposium
Asking Jurors To Do The Impossible
Friday, March 27, 2009
University of Tennessee
College of Law
Knoxville, Tennessee
5.75 hours CLE credit is approved (3.75 hours General and 2 hours Dual)
Register Online
The keynote speaker for the Symposium will be Professor Peter Tiersma. Professor Tiersma is a nationally-renowned expert in writing comprehensible jury instructions. As Professor Tiersma has noted, the right to trial by jury "has little meaning if jurors do not properly understand the law that governs their decisions. . . . This is the function of jury instructions. Jury instructions must communicate the law to jurors [but] communication requires not just that you speak or read to someone but also that the audience actually understand what you intended to communicate." The goal of the 2009 Summers-Wyatt Symposium is to address the concern of how we may be "Asking Jurors To Do The Impossible" when we fail to equip them with meaningful instructions about the law. Professor Tiersma’s address will be followed by responses from a panel of experts from various disciplines including linguistics, law, and psychology.
The Symposium's luncheon keynote speaker will be Judge B. Michael Dann, a Maricopa County Arizona Superior Court judge for 20 years and chief judge for five years. Judge Dann chaired the Arizona Jury Trial Reform Committee and has spoken in over 35 states and other countries in support of the kinds of trial innovations adopted and used in Arizona and other states and courts. He received the 1997 Rehnquist Award for Judicial Excellence at the U.S. Supreme Court and the 2007 American Bar Association’s inaugural Jury Impact Award for his national work on jury trial reform. He has served as a member of the American Jury Project (AJP), which prepared the Revised Principles on Trial by Jury, approved and published by the American Bar Association in 2005. Judge Dann has written and published several law review articles about juries, jury trial innovations, jury nullification, criminal justice reform and judicial selection and performance evaluation.
In the afternoon, Tennessee judges will lead a discussion about current jury instruction issues in Tennessee. The workshop format, which will be facilitated by Professor Tiersma and Judge Dann, will allow law students, lawyers, and citizens to provide input which can then be considered in drafting problematic instructions. The Symposium proceedings will be published in the Spring 2009 volume of the Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy.
Those interested in attending the Symposium may contact either the Center Office at (865) 974-1477 or Micki Fox, the College of Law CLE Director, at (865) 974-4464.
