Rethinking Courtroom Argument From A Rhetorical Perspective

With the development of our economy and society, the ways to settle disputes among people have been changed greatly. The old ways of mediation are seldom used and new ways, such as legal actions, are devised to meet the changing and diversified social needs. Courtroom argument becomes the new locus of contention settlement. Courtroom argument is the verbal conflict involving two or more parties roughly split into two sides. Traditionally, the construction of legal argument is primarily based on dialectic and logic, which are powerful in that they are the crystallizations of the wisdom of great thinkers over thousands of years. However, traditional approaches are proved not efficient enough nowadays and unable to cope with the changing situations. They have to be reformed or modified and new ways should be devised to meet the changing and diversified social needs.Proposing that Aristotle's theory of rhetoric be applied onto the construction of courtroom argument, I discuss a different approach to the issue in my thesis. The altemative approach proposed provides an experiential basis for argument construction. With the introduction of rhetoric, courtroom argument construction takes on a new look. It would cease to be cold thinking and would be transformed into a field or domain in which everybody has more or less first hand or second hand experience.My paper first makes a brief introduction to courtroom argument, discussing the studies on narration and strategies in courtroom arguments. This is followed by a brief introduction to rhetoric, including its definition and Aristotle's theory of this art. The relation between rhetoric, persuasion and power, as well as the differences between western rhetoric and Chinese rhetoric, are also touched on in this section. Then we analyze the courtroom argument from a rhetorical perspective by offering an overview on legal discourses and looking into such topics as the relations between rhetoric and debate, rhetor and audience, rhetoric and courtroom argument. And finally, we carry out an analysis of a case study, demonstrating the contribution of rhetoric to the construction of courtroom argument.