From Truth to Technique at Trial
From Truth to Technique at Trial

Author: Philip Gaines

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-03-23

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0199333610

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From Truth to Technique addresses key questions raised by the burgeoning literature in what Philip Gaines calls advocacy advice texts-manuals, handbooks, and other how-to guides-written by lawyers for lawyers, both practicing and aspiring, to help them be as effective as possible in trial advocacy. In these texts, advice authors share principles, strategies, and techniques for persuading juries and winning cases. Some manuals even form the basis for required advocacy courses in law schools. Unlike training manuals in other professional domains-sales, leadership, management, fundraising, coaching, etc.-advocacy advice texts offer guidance for effectiveness in a realm of activity where the stakes may be the very highest for the parties and where society has an abiding interest in the truth being discovered and justice being done. Helping advocates learn how to win cases may be the ultimate purpose of advice texts, but to what extent are ideas about the values of truth and justice-what Gaines calls metavalues-incorporated into discussions about winning tactics and techniques? To explore this question, Gaines takes the reader through a discursive history of the relation between technique and metavalues as presented in advocacy advice-beginning with a thematic analysis of the first texts published in the Anglo-American tradition in the early 17th century, through treatises written during seasons of radical change in the profession in the 18th and 19th centuries, and up to the present day with a look at the more than 200 trial manuals currently in print. This diacronic study reveals dramatic changes in the place authors give to the metavalues of truth and justice when lawyers advise other lawyers about how to be effective in the courtroom.

Cicero the Advocate
Cicero the Advocate

Author: Jonathan Powell

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2004-07-29

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 0191541516

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This is the first book in English to take Cicero's forensic speeches seriously as acts of advocacy, i.e. as designed to ensure that the person he represents is acquitted or that the person he is prosecuting is found guilty. It seeks to set the speeches within the context of the court system of the Late Roman Republic and to explore in detail the strategies available to Roman advocates to win the votes of jurors. The volume comprises a substantial introduction, fourteen chapters by prominent Ciceronian scholars in Britain, North America, and Germany, and a final chapter by a current British Appeal Court judge who comments on Cicero's techniques from the point of view of a modern advocate. The introduction deals with issues concerning the general nature of advocacy, the Roman court system as compared with other ancient and modern systems, the Roman 'profession' of advocacy and its etiquette, the place of advocacy in Cicero's career, the ancient theory of rhetoric and argument as applied to courtroom advocacy, and the relationship between the published texts of the speeches as we have them and the speeches actually delivered in court. The first eight chapters discuss general themes: legal procedure in Cicero's time, Cicero's Italian clients, Cicero's methods of setting out or alluding to the facts of a case, his use of legal arguments, arguments from character, invective, self-reference, and emotional appeal, the last of these especially in the concluding sections of his speeches. Chapters 9-14 examine a range of particular speeches as case studies - In Verrem II.1 (from Cicero's only major extant prosecution case), Pro Archia, De Domo Sua, Pro Caecina, Pro Cluentio, Pro Ligario. These speeches cover the period of the height of Cicero's career, from 70 BC, when Cicero became acknowledged as the leading Roman advocate, to 49 BC when Caesar's dictatorship required Cicero to adapt his well-tried forensic techniques to drastically new circumstances, and they contain arguments on a wide range of subject-matter, including provincial maladministration, usurpation of citizenship rights, violent dispossession, the religious law relating to the consecration of property, poisoning, bribery, and political offences. Other speeches, including all the better-known ones, are used as illustrative examples in the introduction and in the more general chapters. An appendix lists all Cicero's known appearances as an advocate.