Book Review Cardinal Rules of Advocacy: Understanding and Mastering Fundamental Principles of Persuasion:
| Publication year | 2021 |
| Pages | 292 |
76 CBJ 292. BOOK REVIEW CARDINAL RULES OF ADVOCACY: UNDERSTANDING AND MASTERING FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF PERSUASION:
Superior Court Judge Douglas Lavine and I, as students at Columbia Law School a generation apart, shared an affection for Professor Walter Gellhorn. When Judge Lavine graduated with an LLM, he came to see me with a letter of introduction from the professor. He brought with him his master's thesis on the art of advocacy. I was impressed with it then. He has since transformed the thesis into this marvelous book, Cardinal Rules of Advocacy. I am even more impressed with his insights on the subject now.
Expanding on his original concepts, Judge Lavine has also refined his cardinal principles from his experiences as a private lawyer, Assistant United States Attorney, and trial judge. Moreover, he has enriched his insights by his extraordinary erudition.
Judge Lavine's underlying premise is that a good advocate must be a learned man. Invoking Alexander Pope's lines, "The proper study of Mankind is Man, . . . . The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!," he asserts that mastery in the law demands insights into the human heart and an understanding of the human condition. He quotes Justice Joseph Story, "The perfect lawyer . . . should search the human heart, and explore to their sources the passions and appetites and feelings of mankind." And also Justice Felix Frankfurter, "The best way to prepare for the law is to come to the study of the law as a well-read person. . . . Stock your mind with the deposit of much good reading, and widen and deepen your feelings by experiencing vicariously as much as possible the wonderful mysteries of the universe, . . . ."
Judge Lavine has followed his own advice. His book sparkles with his familiarity with such varied sources as the Bible, Aristotle, Cicero, Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Constantin Stanislavski, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He ranges further to mine materials from appellate court briefs, U. S. Supreme Court arguments, the opening
and closing statements of great lawyers like Clarence Darrow, John W. Davis, and Lloyd Paul Strycker.
The examples he uses from such sources not only illustrate his cardinal principles; they dramatically drive them home. One of those principles is that an advocate should frame the central issue of his or her case compellingly in favor of the client. To make the point, he paints the scene in the Bible where townspeople are about to stone to death a woman accused of adultery. Jesus in the midst of the mob is asked, "Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?" Jesus lifted up himself, and said unto them, "He that is without sin among you, let him cast a stone at her."
To illustrate how an advocate can induce a jury to view her case in a new light, he extracts the incident in Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer when Aunt Polly requires Tom to whitewash her nine-foot high, thirty-yard wide fence. As Tom bemoans his fate on that lovely day, his friend Ben comes along and mocks Tom,
"Say - I'm going in a-swimming, I am. Don't you wish you could? But of course you'd druther work - wouldn't you? Course you would!"
Tom resumed his whitewashing and answered carelessly, "Well maybe it is [work], and maybe it ain't. All I know is it suits Tom...
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