Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Textbook From Truth To Technique at Trial A Discursive History of Advocacy Advice Texts 1St Edition Philip Gaines Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook From Truth To Technique at Trial A Discursive History of Advocacy Advice Texts 1St Edition Philip Gaines Ebook All Chapter PDF
https://textbookfull.com/product/behavioral-finance-for-private-
banking-from-the-art-of-advice-to-the-science-of-advice-2nd-
edition-kremena-k-bachmann/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-latin-new-testament-a-guide-
to-its-early-history-texts-and-manuscripts-1st-edition-houghton/
https://textbookfull.com/product/a-history-of-haematology-from-
herodotus-to-hiv-1st-edition-mccann/
https://textbookfull.com/product/a-child-through-time-the-book-
of-childrens-history-philip-wilkinson/
A short history of Brexit from Brentry to Backstop
O'Rourke
https://textbookfull.com/product/a-short-history-of-brexit-from-
brentry-to-backstop-orourke/
https://textbookfull.com/product/successful-writing-at-work-
philip-c-kolin/
https://textbookfull.com/product/a-concise-history-of-history-
global-historiography-from-antiquity-to-the-present-daniel-woolf/
https://textbookfull.com/product/agility-at-any-age-discover-the-
secret-to-balance-mobility-and-confidence-alexander-technique-
mary-derbyshire/
https://textbookfull.com/product/meggs-history-of-graphic-design-
philip-b-meggs/
From Truth to Technique at Trial
OX FOR D S T U DI E S I N L A NGUAGE A N D L AW
Oxford Studies in Language and Law includes scholarly analyses and descriptions
of language evidence in civil and criminal law cases as well as language issues
arising in the area of statutes, statutory interpretation, courtroom discourse,
jury instructions, and historical changes in legal language.
Series Editor:
Roger W. Shuy, Georgetown University
Editorial Board:
Janet Ainsworth, Seattle University School of Law
Janet Cotterill, Cardiff University, UK
Christopher Heffer, Cardiff University, UK
Robert Leonard, Hofstra University
Anne Lise Kjær, University of Copenhagen
Gregory Matoesian, University of Illinois at Chicago
Elizabeth Mertz, University of Wisconsin Law School and American Bar Foundation
Lawrence Solan, Brooklyn Law School
Philip Gaines
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
9╇8╇7╇6╇5╇ 4╇3╇2╇1
Printed by Sheridan, USA
To Roger W. Shuy
Scholar, Mentor, Friend
CON TEN T S
Acknowledgmentsâ•…â•…ix
[â•›xâ•›]â•…Acknowledgments
From Truth to Technique at Trial
CH A P TER 1
Introduction
Advocacy in the Modern Anglo-American Trial
Because the role of the lawyer is so dominant and influential in the adver-
sarial system, effectiveness in advocacy is paramount. While preparing for
advocacy in the UK is generally limited to a minimal training regimen at
the Inns of Court, American law students and advocates have a bit more
at their disposal. Virtually all American law schools include in their cur-
riculum for prospective juris doctors coursework—often required—in trial
advocacy. In addition, organizations such as the National Institute for Trial
Advocacy maintain programs of continuing education in trial work. Perhaps
most notable, however, is a burgeoning literature—trial manuals written
by lawyers for lawyers—offering guidance and advice on every conceivable
aspect of trial practice: client interview, discovery procedure, jury selection,
case planning, preparation of witnesses, use of exhibits, management of
expert testimony, witness examination, argument, and so forth. Moreover,
many of these books tend to sell well, and some are required reading in law
school advocacy courses. The most popular advice manual, Trial Techniques
by Thomas Mauet, is currently in its ninth edition (2013).
The growth of trial advocacy training in the United States and its
accompanying literature is a recent development, beginning in earnest
in the 1970s. Advocacy trainer Steven Lubet noted in 1987 that “[o]â•„ver
the last fifteen years, trial advocacy has matured from a sideline into a
discipline” (“What We Should Teach” 123–24). Edward J. Imwinkelried,
professor of law at the University of California at Irvine and himself a
prolific author of trial advice materials, reported in 1992 that, following a
post-WWII lull, there was a “renaissance in American advocacy literature”
(175). Imwinkelried attributed this development to complaints by promi-
nent members of the federal judiciary about the quality of American trial
advocacy (180)—complaints representing a “widespread judicial belief
that a significant percentage of trial attorneys were incompetent” (181).
This perception, along with the loosening of pervasive rules that limited
the number of trials by excluding certain types of prosecutorial evidence,
has paved the way for a cottage industry in guides, manuals, and hand-
books that provide both technical information and lawyerly advice for
conducting trial work.
Advice texts are, of course, quintessentially intraprofessional. They
are certainly not secret books, only available to insiders, but their audi-
ence is a very specific one: aspiring and practicing lawyers interested
in learning how to be effective trial advocates. Today, the Harvard Law
I n t r o d u c t i o n â•… [â•›3â•›]
Library’s holdings in advocacy-advice texts comprises more than 200
titles (in their latest editions) with publication dates of 1980 or later—a
span covering a period in which such books could be considered cur-
rent. The words “advocate” or “advocacy” appear in the titles of many,
and a number of other title keywords give a flavor of their content and
purpose. There are emphases on winning, strategy, tactics, techniques, per-
suasion, and effectiveness. Advocates are told how to achieve success, excel-
lence, impact, and power and how to gain an edge. Advocacy is presented
as being both an art and a science. Lawyers are helped to develop skills
and even to understand the application of acting, performance, theater,
and drama. They are encouraged to utilize the findings of psychology and
other fields of social science—including the particular advantages for
women trial lawyers—in order to address the human factors in the court-
room and thus have maximum influence on the jury. Advocates are to pay
close attention to language—including body language—and communica-
tion. They are even told how to learn lessons from card games—especially
poker (!).
The texts tend to be conversational in tone, often using the first per-
son and not infrequently containing humorous or telling anecdotes. Those
serving as general or complete guides, as opposed to focusing on particu-
lar elements of practice such as cross-examination or on specific types
of cases such as bodily injury claims or criminal defense, have a similar
structure, sequentially covering the various aspects of advocacy from case
preparation to closing argument. Through advice texts, experienced and
knowledgeable advocates essentially mentor their current and future col-
leagues in the techniques of practice that have proven to be effective in
persuading juries and judges and winning cases.
Cairns cites William Twining in his view that, in the latter’s 1984 article
on developing the lawyerly skill of fact management, “manuals on cross-
examination and some other aspects of trial practice have not evolved
much beyond the cookbook stage” (38). If anything, in the thirty years since
Twining made this observation, the recipes or “directions” (Rutter 314)
for success in the courtroom found in these books have become even more
uniformly prescriptive. On the other hand, advocacy manuals represent
a genre of discourse that presents what could be called the conventional
wisdom or perhaps the state of the art on effective advocacy. In this sense,
they reveal what the profession thinks about the best way to do trial work;
this alone is of some interest.
Cairns is right, however, in suggesting that instructional manuals
would not be the most likely place to look for theoretical or even reflec-
tive discussions of advocacy—its nature, its ethics, or its relation to
Anglo-American jurisprudence. This intraprofessional literature is only
intended to advise lawyers on how to most effectively do the work that
trial advocates are paid to do, that is, win cases for clients. What I want to
suggest in this book, however, is that what they are intended to do—that
Justice
Truth
In a given case, it might be made clear that a certain event actually hap-
pened and that its occurrence was a fact—that it was true. In this situa-
tion, the assertion that the event happened has a positive, that is, “true,”
truth value. The metavalue of truth, however, is the notion of truth in its
overarching character—the value society holds that demands, for exam-
ple, that truth values be determined for claims and charges. This notion
of the metavalue of truth in the trial setting is roughly consistent with
Peirce’s conception of pragmatic truth—“that concordance of an abstract
statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would
tend to bring scientific belief” (718).
In contrast to medieval approaches to dispute resolution—for exam-
ple, trial by battle, in which the stronger fighter is determined to be
right; or trial by compurgation, where the sworn belief in the innocence
of the accused is offered, often by friends; or trial by ordeal, which fea-
tured subjecting the accused to some form of physical torment or dan-
ger, wherein survival or some other intervention of God would prove
innocence—modern society insists on an objective, unbiased examina-
tion of the facts of the case in the hope of discovering the truth.
In a civil trial, the burden of proof of the claim is upon the plaintiff. If it
is a jury trial, in order for the jury to determine that a claim is valid, they
must decide that a “preponderance of the evidence” supports the claim; in
I n t r o d u c t i o n â•… [â•›7â•›]
the UK, it is “the balance of probabilities” that must support the claim. The
jurors’ task is to figure out, on the basis of the evidence offered, the truth
of what happened or of what the situation was.
In a criminal trial, the jury must determine, beyond a reasonable
doubt, whether the defendant is guilty of the crime for which he or she
has been charged. This determination and the verdict that emerges from it
are understood to be the closest approximation the jury can manage as to
what is the truth with respect to the charge. Jurors are called fact-finders,
and when they reach a verdict (from Latin virus “true” + dictum “saying”),
they announce it by declaring: “We find the defendant” either guilty or not
guilty. To “find” is a legal notion meaning to “determine a fact in dispute”
(Black’s 664) and is conceptually akin to the notion of a scientific finding.
Other concepts in discursive play in the trial, such as evidence, proof, and
showing (as in “The evidence will show … ”) profile the character of the
trial as an empirical pursuit, aimed—as much as possible—at discovering
the truth of what was said, of who acted, of what happened, and so forth.
When trial lawyers speak in their public role as agents of the court system,
they espouse official rhetoric about truth and justice. But when they talk shop,
they often talk craft. (6)
One is not likely to gain critical insights into how advocates think about
and grapple with the implications of the metavalues in the actual per-
formance of courtroom practice from such “official” rhetoric. Finding
out what lawyers’ conceptions about their advocacy practices are, par-
ticularly with respect to a profession that has been the subject of intense
criticism and disdain for centuries, will not tend to be usefully informed
by how its practitioners represent themselves and their work to a gen-
eral audience—or to any audience, for that matter, not among the legal
cognoscenti.
I n t r o d u c t i o n â•… [â•›11â•›]
Dodderidge, and William Phillips. The development of English advocacy-
advice texts was decidedly not continuous, however, being instead clus-
tered in three periods: 1600–1660, 1789–1792, and 1852–1879. Such
a spotty history creates problems, of course, for conducting a satisfy-
ing account of the diachronic development of a professional discourse.
However, during the nearly 300-year timespan, the legal system in England
underwent massive transformation, and changes were punctuated by
key acts of parliament that swept away centuries of legal tradition and
opened the door for novel advocacy practices. Notably, each of the three
periods of advocacy-advice texts are mapped to periods following impor-
tant and consequential events. This book will analyze Anglo-American
advocacy-advice texts from their first appearance at the beginning of the
seventeenth century to the period in which they assumed their current
shape—the mid- to late nineteenth century—from the perspective of how
the metavalues of justice and truth are represented in them.
The texts of the first period can be characterized as the beginning of
published advocacy advice in the common law tradition, and those of
the last period as the prototypes of the modern advocacy-advice manu-
als. The analysis thus provides a comprehensive discursive history of
intraprofessional ideas about advocacy advice in the Anglo-American
tradition. Each of the texts treated stands on its own as a distinctive
representation of perspectives on what constituted appropriate and
effective trial advocacy at the time. Additionally, however, each of the
three periods will be shown to highlight certain approaches to and com-
mon themes about advocacy advice. The book considers the broad sweep
of these texts from the standpoint of how the profession’s ideas about
advocacy and its relation to metavalues have evolved over the period of
nearly 300 years since its first appearance to its prototypical modern
form.
OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS
Introduc tion [ 13 ]
examine and cross-examine witnesses. Although rarely done at first and
then only at individual judges’ discretion, the practice increased steadily
until, by the last quarter of the seventeenth century, defense advocates
were regularly appearing in felony cases. Because defense lawyers contin-
ued to be prohibited from addressing the jury directly, cross-examination
became their strategy for doing so indirectly; it was during this period
that cross-examination developed into a virtual performance art form
and became—in the hands of such luminaries as William Garrow—a pow-
erful method for influencing juries and winning verdicts. Of course, civil
litigation continued apace in England, and these four treatises put most of
their advocacy-advice attention on effective courtroom speeches.
Chapters 4 and 5 examine the two-volume work The Advocate: His
Training, Practice, Rights, and Duties by Edward William Cox. Volume 1
was first serialized over a five-year period (1847–1852) in the Law Times,
a journal for the legal profession edited by Cox, and came into print as
a monograph in 1852. Volume 2 never appeared in book form but was
also serialized in the Law Times from 1856–1859. The first volume of
The Advocate was somewhat of a hybrid. Although the first nearly three-
quarters of the treatise conform to the genre of the law study book—albeit
specifically for advocates—the last 140 pages constitute the first com-
prehensive, systematic advice for effectiveness in all the essential com-
ponents of the trial: opening statement to the jury; direct, cross, and
re-examination of witness; and closing argument.
The fifty-plus years separating the work of Ruggles and Cox was again a
time of momentous change in the practice of advocacy. In 1836, Parliament
passed the Prisoners’ Counsel Bill, an act that removed the last hindrance
to full defense in felony cases: the prohibition on addresses to the jury.
Advocates were now free not only to examine their own witnesses and
cross-examine those of the opposition but also to speak directly to the
jury. In keeping with this freedom and responsibility, Cox took it upon
himself, in the second volume of The Advocate, to present a complete tax-
onomy of the possible defenses that could be marshaled in the most com-
mon types of felony cases: larceny, fraud, murder, manslaughter, assault,
concealment of birth, rape, arson, and perjury. Remarkable in their thor-
oughness and detail, these chapters specify for the first time the rhetori-
cal structures for criminal defenses whose broad strokes continue to form
the basis of today’s trial practice manuals.
Chapter 6 looks at Richard Harris’s 1879 Hints on Advocacy. Although
Harris systematically covers the same ground as Cox does in the first vol-
ume of The Advocate, Harris’s text is notable in that it focuses exclusively
on advocacy advice, making it the first advocacy manual proper. Because
I n t r o d u c t i o n â•… [â•›15â•›]
advocacy advice that are relevant—even tangentially—to these metaval-
ues. For example, in the chapter on the advocacy-advice texts of the late
eighteenth century, I devote a significant amount of space to a discussion
of the place of rhetoric in these texts. Although the authors rarely refer to
the metavalues in their discussions of rhetoric, the association—which
I do not often make—will be obvious to the informed reader. The purpose
of this scheme of what might be called discursive “over-representation” is
to exhibit elements of the rich, thick context in which the metavalues are,
of course, inextricably embedded.
Finally, there were a number of texts written during the three periods
under examination that had much to say about advocacy from perspectives
such as the historical, cultural, and jurisprudential. They were, however,
not advocacy-advice texts. Thus, my choice to exclude them from analysis
is not arbitrary but intentional—not because they would not have much to
reveal about historical or even contemporaneous conceptions of advocacy
but because their purpose and thus their focus is different from advocacy-
advice materials, which are oriented to a very specific audience—aspiring
and practicing advocates—and have as their goal the impartation of
advice and guidance for the practice of trial advocacy. For the obvious rea-
son, I also exclude from consideration the significant number of law study
books that do not contain advocacy advice. Finally, I also do not take into
account books on rhetoric, some of which contain significant advice appli-
cable to—and, in some cases, specific to—trial advocacy. In this book, my
attention is focused exclusively on those intraprofessional texts—written
by lawyers for lawyers (and those who aspire to be)—which set as their
task advising about how to be an effective advocate.
Illustrator: A. G. Learned
Language: English
AMERICAN PATTY,
A Story of 1812.
BECK’S FORTUNE,
A Story of School and
Seminary Life.
Illustrated by Louis Meynell.
$1.25.
NOBODY’S ROSE,
Or The Girlhood of Rose
Shannon.
Illustrated by A. G. Learned. Price, Net
$1.00. Postpaid $1.12.
BY
ADELE E. THOMPSON
ILLUSTRATED BY A. G. LEARNED
BOSTON
LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.
Copyright, 1912, by Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.
Published, August, 1912
Nobody’s Rose
NORWOOD PRESS
BERWICK & SMITH CO.
NORWOOD, MASS.
U. S. A.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
Out in the open country the day was dull and grey, with low-
hanging clouds and occasional drops of slow-falling rain, but in the
city the clouds of smoke hung still lower than those of the sky, and
the dropping soot-flakes made black the moisture gathered on the
roofs of the houses, the leaves of the trees, and the sidewalks
trodden by many feet.
It was on a city street, one where the smoke-clouds from the tall
chimneys trailed low and the soot fell in its largest flakes, that ever
and again a sound asserted itself above the beat of hurrying feet.
The sound was not loud, only a little girl sobbing softly to herself as
she shrank with her head on her arm at one side of an open
stairway; and the words that she repeated over and over to herself,
“What shall I do? Where shall I go?” were less in the nature of
questions than a lamentation. But children tearful, loudly, even
vociferously tearful, were in that vicinity so frequent that people
passed and repassed the child without giving to her thought or heed.
For the street was one more populous than select, and while the
tall red brick houses that bordered it had once aspired to something
of the aristocratic, they were now hopelessly sunken to the tenement
stage; while the neighboring region leading through the sandy open
square of the Haymarket, where loads of hay always stood awaiting
purchasers, down the long steep hill to the river, with its crowded
shipping and its border of great lumber yards, shops, and factories,
had never made pretense to anything except poverty of the most
open and unattractive kind. In summer the whole region fairly
swarmed with the overflowing inmates of the overcrowded houses.
Children were everywhere, in large part barefooted, ragged, and so
dirty that they might easily have been taken for an outgrowth of the
sandheaps in which they burrowed and buried themselves when
tired of the delights of the street. To see them there, in utter
indifference to the constant passing of heavily loaded teams
sometimes prompted the inquiry as to how many were daily killed?
But though, on occasion, they were dragged from under the very
horses’ hoofs by the untidy women whose shrill voices were so often
heard sounding from open doors and windows, few were the
accidents to either life or limb.
The not distant city market house increased the crowds, especially
at certain hours of the day, as also the street venders and itinerants
who contributed their full share to the noise and confusion. Hook-
nosed old men, with bags over their shoulders, and shrill cries of “P-
a-p-e-r r-a-g-s” abounded; the organ-grinder with his monkey was a
frequent figure, with the invariable crowd of youngsters at his heels;
the maimed and the blind, wearing placards appealing to the public
sympathy and extending tin cups for contributions, were to be found
on the corners; the scissors-grinder’s bell was a common sound, as
were the sonorous offers of “Glassputin.” Here was a man loudly and
monotonously appealing to the credulity of the public, and soliciting
patronage for his wonderful fortune-telling birds, a little company of
dingy and forlorn-looking canaries, who by the selection of sundry
envelopes were supposed to reveal the past, present, and future.
There, another man exhibited a row of plates with heavy weights
attached, and extolled the wonderful merits of his cement for
mending crockery, while the sellers of small wares, combs,
pocketbooks, letter-paper, cheap jewelry, and the like, added their
calls to the rest.
A few of the houses still retained a dingy scrap of yard, where thin
and trampled grass blades made an effort to grow, but the most part
had been built out to the street and converted into cheap
restaurants, cheap clothing shops, cheap furniture shops, and the
class of establishments that are cheap indeed, especially as regards
the character of their wares.
In such a confusion of people and sounds it is not strange that a
small girl crying to herself would attract so little attention that even
the big, fat policeman on that beat passed her a number of times
before he noticed her, and then did not stop, as he saw that she was
well dressed. At last, as she still remained crouched down in a
dejected little heap, he stopped, moved as much by the thought of a
little girl in his own home as from a sense of duty, with the inquiry,
“Here, Sis, what’s the matter with you?”
She started up at the brusque but not unkindly tone, and lifting
from her sheltering arm a round and dimpled face, with wide grey
eyes, now swollen and disfigured with tears, answered brokenly and
in a half-frightened voice, for the policeman stood to her as the terror
rather than the guardian of the law, “Oh, I don’t know what to do! I
don’t know where to go!”
“You don’t, eh? Well, it seems to me you are a pretty big girl to get
lost; where do you live?”
“I don’t live anywhere,” with a fresh sob.
“That’s rather queer, not to live anywhere,” and he looked at her a
trifle more sternly. “What’s your name, if you have any?”
“Posey Sharpe.”
“Oh, indeed,” and he glanced at the stairway before him, where a
small black sign with gilt lettering on the step just above her head
read,
“So that was your mother, was it, who raised all that row here last
night?”
“No, she wasn’t my mother, but I lived with her.”
“If she wasn’t, how comes it your name is the same?”
“It isn’t, really, only I’ve lived with her so long that people called me
that. She said I was her niece, but I wasn’t any relation at all.”
He looked at the sign again, “Madam Sharpe. Well,” with a chuckle
at his own witticism, “she wasn’t sharp enough to keep from being
exposed. And you were the spirit child, I suppose?”
Posey nodded, a very dejected-looking spirit she seemed at that
moment.
“Well, when she took herself off so suddenly why didn’t you go
with her?”
“I ran up under the roof and hid, and I didn’t know till this morning
that she had gone.”
“I see; and was she so good to you, and did you think so much of
her that you are taking on this way?”
Posey hesitated a moment. “She might have been better, and she
might have been worse,” she answered with a candor of simplicity.
“But I haven’t anybody else to live with, and I didn’t think she’d use
me so.”
“I see; it was rather rough.” There was sympathy in his tone, and
even in the way he tapped his knee with his polished club.
“And,” continued Posey, “this morning the man who owns the
place came and he was awfully mad and cross. He said Madam
Sharpe owed him for rent, and that she had hurt the reputation of the
building, and he told me to put my things in my trunk, and he shoved
it out into the hall and told me to clear out, and he locked the door so
I couldn’t go in again. And I haven’t had any dinner, nor I haven’t a
cent of money, nor anywhere to go, and I don’t know what’ll become
of me,” and she wrung her hands with another burst of tears.
Here was the cause of her misery—the semblance of home, care,
and protection, poor though it was, had been suddenly stricken
away, leaving her a helpless, solitary estray, a bit of flotsam at the
mercy of the world’s buffeting currents. Nor was her misery softened
by even the dubious bliss of ignorance that most children enjoy as to
the sterner realities of life, for already in her eleven years she had
learned only too well what poverty implies, and how sad a thing it is
to be friendless and homeless.
Poor little Posey, with her soft eyes, dimpled mouth, and rosy face,
she seemed made for sunshine and caresses. Scant indeed,
however, had been her measure of either. Her earliest remembrance
had been of a home of two rooms in a tenement, a poor place, from