In 2003, a highly regarded, intellectually energetic U.S. judge declared:

Concerning the limits of deliberation, I can speak from more than twenty years of personal experience as an appellate judge. …judges discuss least the most sensitive cases, or the most sensitive issues in a case, the ones that stir judges most deeply. …What is true of the deliberation of judges is true also of the deliberations of legislatures and of the citizenry at large.^

Communication among friends and family has its own constraints. They are unlike those of public deliberation.