Classical rhetorical techniques can enhance the persuasiveness of Supreme Court opinions by making their language clear, lively, and memorable. This book focuses on three techniques—“invention” (creation of arguments), “arrangement” (organization), and “style” (word choice)—in the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Robert Jackson, Hugo Black, William Brennan, and Antonin Scalia, respectively. The justices featured here contributed to the Court’s rhetorical legacy in different ways, but all five rejected the magisterial opinion style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in favor of a more personal and conversational format. As a result, their opinions have endured, and even modern readers who cannot recall the justices’ names understand and embrace the ideas expressed in their legal writings and apply those ideas to current debates. Practicing lawyers, professors, and students can use this book to study legal writing techniques and make their own writing more persuasive.

Lawyers, law students and their teachers all too frequently overlook the most comprehensive, adaptable and practical analysis of legal discourse ever devised: the classical art of rhetoric. Classical analysis of legal reasoning, methods and strategy is the foundation and source for most modern theories on the topic. Beginning with Aristotle's Rhetoric and culminating with Cicero's De Oratore and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, Greek and Roman rhetoricians created a clear, experience-based theoretical framework for analyzing legal discourse. This book is the first to systematically examine the connections between classical rhetoric and modern legal discourse. It traces the history of legal rhetoric from the classical period to the present day and shows how modern theorists have unknowingly benefited from the classical works. It also applies classical rhetorical principles to modern appellate briefs and judicial opinions to demonstrate how a greater familiarity with the classical sources can deepen our understanding of legal reasoning.

Rhetoric is ubiquitous in modern discourse: from arguments delivered in the High Court, to advertisements disseminated in the high street. For the legal and political advocate, persuasion is also a professional technique that must be perfected properly to practise each art. In contrast with the classical era and the middle ages, in which grammar, rhetoric and dialectic were basic features of all education, modern curricula almost entirely neglect any theoretical study of the methods of rhetoric. Rediscovering Rhetoric re-introduces to modern practitioners and students a grasp of the speeches, writings and methodologies of the great classical scholars of rhetoric. Part 1 - Law and Language in the Greco-Roman Tradition provides a contextualised introduction to significant theorists of rhetoric in the classical period, and consists of four chapters written by practising barristers and a current Justice of the Federal Court of Australia. Part 2 - The Practice of Persuasion comprises essays by practitioners distinguished in their pursuit of legal persuasion - one former and two current Justices of the High Court of Australia - illuminating their experiences of argument from the perspective of both bench and bar. Part 3 - The Politics of Persuasion performs a similar function to Part 2, in the related domain of politics. It includes a chapter by Graham Freudenberg, former speechwriter for Gough Whitlam and others. Together the three parts provide a unique inter-disciplinary perspective on the theory and practice of legal and political persuasion. Published in association with the NSW Bar Association.

In their professional lives, courtroom lawyers must do these two things well: speak persuasively and write persuasively. In this noteworthy book, two noted legal writers systematically present every important idea about judicial persuasion in a fresh, entertaining way. The book covers the essentials of sound legal reasoning, including how to develop the syllogism that underlies any argument. From there the authors explain the art of brief writing, especially what to include and what to omit, so that you can induce the judge to focus closely on your arguments. Finally, they show what it takes to succeed in oral argument.

This book brings together Latinx scholars in Rhetoric and Composition to discuss keywords that have been misused or appropriated by forces working against the interests of minority students. For example, in educational and political forums, rhetorics of identity and civil rights have been used to justify ideas and policies that reaffirm the myth of a normative US culture that is white, Eurocentric, and monolinguistically English. Such attempts amount to a project of neo-colonization, if we understand colonization to mean not only the taking of land but also the taking of culture, of which language is a crucial part. The editors introduce the concept of epistemic delinking and argue for its use in conceptualizing a kind of rhetorical and discursive decolonization, and contributors offer examples of this decolonization in action through detailed work on specific terms. Specifically, they draw on their training in rhetoric and on their own experiences as people of color to help reset the field's agenda. They also theorize new keywords to shed light on the great varieties of Latinx writing, rhetoric, and literacies that continue to emerge and circulate in the culture at large, in the hope that the field will feel more urgently the need to recognize, theorize, and teach the intersections of writing, pedagogy, and politics.

In Point Made, Ross Guberman uses the work of great advocates as the basis of a valuable, step-by-step brief-writing and motion-writing strategy for practitioners. The author takes an empirical approach, drawing heavily on the writings of the nation's 50 most influential lawyers.

Ward Farnsworth details the timeless principles of rhetoric from Ancient Greece to the present day, drawing on examples in the English language of consummate masters of prose, such as Lincoln, Churchill, Dickens, Melville, and Burke.

Since antiquity, philosophy and rhetoric have traditionally been cast as rivals, with the former often lauded as a search for logical truth and the latter usually disparaged as empty speech. But in this erudite intellectual history, Nancy S. Struever stakes out a claim for rhetoric as the more productive form of inquiry. Struever views rhetoric through the lens of modality, arguing that rhetoric’s guiding interest in what is possible—as opposed to philosophy’s concern with what is necessary—makes it an ideal tool for understanding politics. Innovative readings of Hobbes and Vico allow her to reexamine rhetoric’s role in the history of modernity and to make fascinating connections between thinkers from the classical, early modern, and modern periods. From there she turns to Walter Benjamin, reclaiming him as an exemplar of modernist rhetoric and a central figure in the long history of the form. Persuasive and perceptive, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity is a novel rewriting of the history of rhetoric and a heady examination of the motives, issues, and flaws of contemporary inquiry.