Pursuing and resisting argumentative projects in Q&A sequences during a trial

In jury trials, attorneys must build arguments about the facts and how these facts should be interpreted, and this happens through Q&A sequences with their own and the opposing party's witnesses. The structure of the courtroom interrogation usually disadvantages witnesses, especially in cross-examination because attorneys have the upper hand in the exchanges. This paper analyzes the Q&A sequences in a trial involving lawyers as witnesses and concerning abstract issues to investigate the different strategies attorneys and witnesses use to engage argumentatively. Specifically, the data are from a civil rights trial in which a female attorney sues a law school for not hiring her as an instructor. The suit alleged that the law school politically discriminated against her following her job talk because of her conservative political views. The paper shows how attorneys with their own witnesses can engage in co-reasoning, and how attorneys and the opposing side's witnesses can resist each other's argumentative projects. More specifically, we show that a question's answerability is a key resource which can be exploited by both attorneys and witnesses.