A lovely article and if I was Dr Kate Searle, Dr Maggie Currer and Esther Davidson I would be very concerned by this:
Naomi:
One of the witnesses on the other side had given some rather technical (or at least technical-sounding) evidence on a subject on which there are a lot of practised obfuscations in circulation. I was worried the tribunal might be blinded with science, and particularly keen to make sure the cross-examination landed, so I decided to role-play it the day before, with Charlotte playing the witness.
The first practice run didn’t go well. Charlotte made an infuriatingly slippery and plausible witness. I went back to my hotel room and spent the rest of the evening rewriting my questions, tightening them up and blocking off escape routes. The second attempt — and then the third, with the witness herself — went much better.
Charlotte:
I enjoyed this exercise. I’d played witnesses before, of course, in advocacy training exercises. But it had a new level of immediacy doing it in the course of an ongoing hearing, where the witness was a real person we were going to meet tomorrow. Seeing how Naomi adapted her questioning to deal with my evasions and then seeing how well that worked with the real witness was one of the most satisfying and instructive bits of the hearing for me.
It shows how much prep NC and CE did before dismantling the DSD argument.