"Making Your Case, The Art of Persuading Judges"
Justice Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner have produced a delightful, and indispensible, guide for practicing attorneys in "Making Your Case, The Art of Persuading Judges"; a text which begins with the following admonishment:
"To lighten the journey, we have adopted a conversational style that includes occasional contractions and remarks more flippant or colloquial than one would normally encounter in legal commentary. The reader who feels that some of these indulgences fall short of the formality and sobriety expected of a jurist should attribute all of them to the other author, and assume that they have been included under protest."
Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner, Making Your Case, The Art of Persuading Judges, at xix - xx (Thomson/West 2008).
The authors' journey with the reader continues in this style through 115 sections in the space of 206 pages, with each section containing a different fact of advocacy that will be ignored by counsel at their peril. The advice contained in this book applies equally at every point in the judicial process, beginning with pre-trial motions and ending with arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States.
Your time with Making Your Case will be time well spent.
UPDATE - March 16 - March 20, 2009
Justice Scalia sits down with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution in these 5 short video segments of "uncommon knowledge"
