Jules Epstein Are Courtroom Persuasion Techniques Unethical?
"Primacy" is a far cry from "tribalistic arguments" (or the cigar trick) and there is strong reason to treat the two as radically different and as not both being barred from the courtroom by "law and rules."
November 16, 2023 at 01:01 PM
5 minute read
Is the use of persuasion techniques—for example, primacy, storytelling, ethos—unethical? According to one author, professor Dane S. Ciolino, the answer is "yes." The article, "Harmonizing Legal Ethics Rules With Advocacy Norms," 36 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 199 (2023) (hereafter "Harmonizing"), begins with the story of when "Clarence Darrow famously inserted a straight wire into a cigar and smoked the cigar during trial until the ash grew and grew but never fell, fixating jurors and causing them to pay little attention to his opponent's argument." It then posits some unequivocal assertions:
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