In ”The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” Erving Goffman uses “the term ‘performance’ to refer to all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers.” He labels as “front” the “expressive equipment” that a performer deploys. The front can be atomized into a couple of different parts: the “setting” and “personal front,” which itself has two components, “appearance” and “manner.” Each of these concepts finds concrete expression in the drama of trial.

Goffman identifies a “setting” with “furniture, decor physical layout, and other background items which supply the scenery and stage props for the spate of human action played out before, within, or upon it.” In previous installments, we discussed how the particular trial setting—courthouse and courtroom—impacts the human interaction taking place within. But it remains for us to demonstrate how personal fronts are important to trial in critical but less obvious ways than testimony, exhibits and arguments. What we’ll find is that Robert Ferguson is onto something when he suggests that “Setting and performance reinforce each other through the forms of blocking, proxemics, kinesics, and paralanguage. … Manipulation of the arena of the courtroom can be clever, picayune, and sometimes hilarious, but every movement has three goals in mind: to be seen clearly, to be heard distinctly, and to fill as much of the arena as the court will allow.”

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