Valuing A Space Between: Using Litigation as a Model for Facilitating Political Discourse

Political partisanship is a much discussed and lamented topic today. Generally, it is viewed as both harmful to our democracy and to the quality of political information available, with more and more people retreating to a corner and surrounding themselves with like minds. In this paper, I confront this reality but challenge the idea that partisanship, even hyper-partisanship, is always a negative. Pulling from my experience as a litigator, I explain why I believe that litigation procedure could be used as a model for how to think about political discourse differently. I suggest a way to use partisanship productively to improve information quality and exchange. The key, in my opinion, is to combine a structured information gathering and analysis process with partisan and neutral elements.