The Legal Mind: An Approach to the Dynamics of Advocacy

Out of Print

The Advocate is a person who argues, but in some special ways. - This book is an attempt to analyse and illustrate, for the benefit of layman and lawyer alike, exactly how the Advocate approaches his task and how he diagnoses, uses words, cross-examines, presents a case.

Always he is using commonsense, but it is an applied commonsense, shading into many subtleties of thought, and controlled by the structure of the Law, and especially by the principles of Evidence.

This book, as a study of the legal prac¬tice, is orthodox. But it is completely novel, because it introduces the reader to Law and Advocacy by plunging him into the midst of the battle. It is also new in that it attempts the teaching of law and advocacy from the psychological standpoint. Thus, by thinking on how the legal mind works, the reader's mind should become adept in apprehending the ambiguities and possibilities of factual and legal situations.

For the rest, although the book contains much sound 'learning,' it is not (what the conventional text-books must be) a challenge to the memory. Rather the appeal is to intelligence. Being understood (and it is so written as to be easily under-stood) the teaching that is attempted here becomes part of the reader's mind: and its mastery represents a valuable stage in the acquisition of a technique of thinking, which, once attained, can never be lost.