Legal Rhetoric And The Influence On The Judicial Activities Of The Participants

Rhetoric can be tracked back to the ancient Greek period in the application ofcourt argumentation at the earliest. At that time, early-stage rhetoricians who werespecialized in offering argumentation skills to the public showed up. However, it wasAristotle that studied rhetoric as a discipline. He also defined rhetoric as a skill ofspeech which aimed at persuading the audiences. Moreover, Aristotle’s elaboration ofrhetorical argumentation also has great significance to the development of rhetoric inlater generations.After the ancient Greek and ancient Rome period, rhetoric went through a roughpath in its development. While upon the arrival of the20thcentury, and as the processof democratization in the Western society accelerated, rhetoric re-appeared and caughtthe public’s close attention as a means of reasoning. Thus, rhetoric embraced anotherglorious period-the new rhetoric period. It was in the exact period that outstandingrhetoric masters showed up in large numbers, such as Burke, Perelman, Toulmin,Habermas, etc. They all emphasized on the study of rhetorical argumentation, whichwas an important change of direction in the studies of rhetoric. Since then, rhetorichad been regarded as a kind of communicative behavior which highlighted theinteraction between the speaker and the audiences, and rhetoric was no longer ameans of persuasion from one side. Furthermore, rhetoric also extended to such fieldsas law and psychology in this period. Its study achievements in law will also bespecially expounded in this thesis. For example, as Toulmin analyzed in which wayargumentation pattern was applied in legal context, how each constitute part of themodel has been demonstrated in legal argumentation will be described in the chapteron the analysis of legal argumentation. To sum up, legal argumentation was the product of rhetoric at a certain stage ofdevelopment, and now it has developed into an important branch of rhetoric. Theinfluence of legal rhetoric on the participants of judicial acts is discussed specially inthis thesis. However, since legal rhetoric originates from rhetoric, in the first chapter,in consideration of tracking back to the source, the author introduces the developmentand theoretical achievement of Western rhetoric, and demonstrates that rhetoric andlegal rhetoric are in a relation of including and included, and are so closely linkedtogether that separated from one, the other cannot exist.This thesis aims at bringing the theory of rhetoric at the service of judicialpractice. However, an intermediate bridge must be utilized to serve practice withtheory. The author believes that this bridge is the participant of judicial activities. Inconsideration of this, with the help of subject classification method, this thesisexpounds the influence rhetoric theory has on the judge, public prosecutor and lawyerin judicial activities. The author hopes to attract the attention of all the involvedsubjects and motivate them to attach importance to the active role rhetoric plays injudicial activities and improve their ability in rhetoric. In the meanwhile, in the fourthchapter, in order to be more reasonable, the author quotes and deeply analyzes somecases happened in China. In this way, the readers can understand the function ofrhetoric in a more vivid way.However, due to its probability, rhetoric has been labeled sophistically at theinitial stage. How to restrict the indiscriminative utilization of rhetoric has been aquestion haunting Western rhetoricians. The development of rhetoric in China is alsoconfronted with different kinds of dilemmas. It is our hope that as a foreign product,rhetoric can realize the joint with Chinese localization, and that more scholars candevote themselves to this specific field and make theoretical contributions topreparing the arrival of law-governing era.