I read about an interesting study on eye contact that was posted today on the legal writing listserv, “Why Eye Contact Can Fail to Win People Over.” The article refers to a study conducted in Germany where university students were polled about their opinions on controversial topics and then asked to watch a two-minute video on these topics. When the students agreed with viewpoint being expressed, they were more likely to look at the eyes of the speaker expressing the opinion, and less likely when they disagreed or felt neutral.

The students were also less likely to change their opinions, as measured in a second poll, when they looked directly in the speakers’ eyes. This was particularly true when the person in the video looked directly at viewers, rather than to the side of the frame.

Then in a second study, students were asked to look either at a person’s eyes or mouth.

The students who looked at the speakers’ eyes changed their attitudes less than the people who looked at the speakers’ mouths. They also said they were less interested in hearing more about the views presented.

My first-year law students are beginning to learn about legal citation.  Today we discussed a question that sometimes causes confusion:  whether to abbreviate the first word of a case name.  The answer requires a student to synthesize a few rules from the Bluebook.

Bluebook Rule 10.2.2 states that all words listed in Table 6 (the table of abbreviations) must be abbreviated, even the first word in a party name.  Table 6 notes that a word of eight letters (or more) may be abbreviated at the author’s discretion if substantial space is saved.  Abbreviated words are punctuated by a period, unless the abbreviation is formed with an apostrophe (Corp., but Ass’n).