Further reading: Kavanaugh's fate will have a massive ripple effect.

I’m a trial lawyer. I used to be a federal prosecutor, and now I do civil litigation and criminal defense. I spend my time trying to use the investigative and fact-finding tools of the legal system to resolve problems for people and companies that get in disputes. Every one of those disputes involves contested versions of particular events that happened years in the past. I, and thousands of others in my profession, make our living figuring out, methodically, who did what, when, where, how, and to whom, in cases where accounts are disputed, memories have faded, records have been lost, and witnesses don’t want to cooperate. And we do it in adversarial proceedings in which each factual assertion must be sourced, cited, and proved with evidence and testimony.

There’s nothing arcane or even particularly difficult about the investigatory steps the government could take to reach a reasonable factual conclusion about the Kavanaugh allegations. I simply cannot understand why the Judiciary Committee refuses to use the resources it has—namely, subpoena power, through which the committee can compel witnesses to testify and produce documents.

The committee’s approach to the Kavanaugh hearings reinforces the false image of trial practice as just throwing two people up there and letting the jury decide whom to believe. That’s not what trials are. When both sides have adequate resources (an important caveat), trials—and the months-long periods of document production and deposition testimony that lead up to them—are extraordinarily good vehicles for arriving at the truth.

I have the same satisfying feeling in every case as the evidence gradually fills in the gaps and a story begins to emerge. People leave remarkably specific paper trails of their activities, and are remarkably honest when they’re under oath. Most witnesses are very hesitant to outright lie in sworn testimony. They’ll squirm; they’ll be nonresponsive; they’ll have sudden failures of memory. But a good trial lawyer eats all that for breakfast; the coin of the realm in our business is the ability to pin a reluctant witness down to a concrete, definite answer. It’s common, moreover, for lawyers to investigate and litigate allegations of decades-old behavior. There’s nothing inherently unfair in a proceeding that seeks to uncover facts about such allegations.

Read Quinta Jurecic on Brett Kavanaugh’s discovery of injustice

Here are a few examples.

The federal government, right now, is bringing legal challenges to people’s citizenship, alleging that they were not in fact born in the U.S. I handled one such case years ago, right after I left the Justice Department. The government sought to deport my client, who was born in the 1970s and had lived in both Mexico and the U.S. throughout her life, claiming that she had actually been born in Mexico. My client and her family claimed she had been born in Los Angeles, in her grandmother’s house. She didn’t have a California birth certificate, but California has a procedure for getting one. So the family went to state court in L.A., offered sworn testimony from multiple family members who were present at the birth, and presented photos and other documents attesting to their whereabouts at the time.