Objection, Your Honor, He's Assisting the Trier of Fact!

New Jersey now permits questions from jurors, and alarm has broken out over how experts respond to them. The New Jersey Law Journal has more. (Tip to The Legal Reader.)

The concern, apparently, is that the experts may start to soliloquize, and that the adverse party might be put in the awkward position of objecting. But we're not sure how worried it's reasonable to be. In our experience, experts are prone to wander afield even when lawyers are asking the questions. And we're not very patient with the idea that a party's due process rights are affronted when the party's lawyer is required to raise objections. If we indulge the assumption that jurors are sufficiently fair-minded to be there in the first place, can the rules and the process not be explained to them, in a way they can be brought to accept?