ABSTRACT
This essay attends to the lived experience of risk and injury through the vantage of a jury member broadcasting on social media his anticipation of participation in a court proceeding and reflecting after the proceeding on the relation between civic duty and television. The proceeding was called to determine the grounds of reasonable delay in a woman’s discovery—via an act of reading a magazine advertisement placed by a malpractice law firm—that her daughter had been medically injured by another, possibly a corporation. Prior to her reading, the woman’s certitude was that her daughter’s injury was a gift of God: this assuredness does not erode but is displaced through a secularization of risk that the magazine appeared to enable. Through the inconstant mediation of the juror, who claims a heroic effort to have turned the verdict in favor of the woman despite testimony that in accounting for her shifting relation to certitude via reading produced contradiction, we witness the failure of her claim of reasonable delay in discovery as his failure (it being all about him) to produce an adequate theory of mediated risk, a failure this chapter’s author can only amplify.
