Believe It or Not: Teaching Credibility and Corroboration Across Clinics

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

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Who do we believe, and why? Client credibility is the dispositive question in many legal proceedings, from asylum adjudications to tax court trials. As students learn how to effectively convince a skeptical adjudicator, they often wrestle with their own doubts about their clients’ stories, and the effect of those doubts on the attorney-client relationship. This interactive workshop introduces a reflective tool from the pedagogy of Clinical Pastoral Education: a verbatim reconstruction of a conversation, focusing on awareness of both verbal, physical, and emotional elements of the interaction. The exercise provides a framework for fostering insight into the unreliability of memory, and self-awareness of how our own emotional state affects both our interactions and our memories of interactions. From this starting point, the presenters will share interdisciplinary approaches to teaching credibility as an independent subject, and create space for reflection and sharing of best practices among attendees