The Tools of Argument

How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

by Joel P. Trachtman

Number of pages: 200

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

BBB Library: Booklets

ISBN: 978-1481246385



About the Author

Professor at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy since 1989. Served as Academic Dean and Interim Dean. Before Fletcher, practicing lawyer in New York and Hong Kong. Focus on trade law, international economic law, international financial law, U.S. foreign relations law, economic analysis of international law. Author of The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win.

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Editorial Review

Joel Trachtman's book presents in plain and lucid terms the powerful tools of argument that have been honed through the ages in the discipline of law. If you are a law student or new lawyer, a business professional or a government official, this book will boost your analytical thinking, your foundational legal knowledge, and your confidence as you win arguments for your clients, your organizations or yourself.

Book Reviews

InThe Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win, Joel P. Tractman combines the skills of reasoned persuasion along with the tools of argument to give his readers knowledge that will enhance their legal argument abilities throughout their careers. This book is written with a light tone and is incredibly conversational.

The book,The Tools of Argument, contains a plethora of thinking tools that will assist the legal practitioner to construct better arguments.

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Wisdom to Share

The art of reasoned persuasion is an iterative, recursive heuristic, meaning that we must go back and forth between the facts and the rules until we have a good fit. We cannot see the facts properly until we know what framework to place them into, and we cannot determine what framework to place them into until we see the basic contours of the facts. The great economist Friedrich Hayek said, “Without a theory, the facts are silent

Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the expression of the institutionalized medium of reason, that’s all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, unprincipled, undisciplined feeling.” Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1962

Legal practice is, to a great extent, ethically ambivalent. Lawyers pledge to represent their clients zealously, and so they are charged, where their client is wrong, with trying to make the weaker argument appear the stronger. Yet, they also see themselves as officers of the court, or agents of the state, and in that role they should seek to enforce the law as intended and must act honestly.

Don’t try arguing to someone to whom you are romantically attracted that you have a right to their reciprocal affection, or that they bear the burden of proving that you are not attractive to them.

Law, like taxes in the words of the great judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, is the price of civilization.

the law itself may be inconsistent with substantive justice—it may be inconsistent with what you or I believe is right. The idea that we have a legal system rather than a system that simply says, “Do what is right in each circumstance,” represents a recognition that we must compromise about what we think may be right in order to live in a society with others who have varying visions of what is right.

Although a legal system is rooted in the values of its society, it also has an independent dynamic, with principles, language, and rules of its own.

Although a legal system is rooted in the values of its society, it also has an independent dynamic, with principles, language, and rules of its own.

A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.

You let me control the facts, I’ll let you control the law, and I will always win.