The Tools of Argument Quotes

“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.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“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”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“The ancient Chinese saying states, “faintest ink over sharpest memory.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“You might say that those who seek change must show that something is indeed “broken.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“Socrates chose to drink hemlock rather than to follow morality in contravention of Athen's laws. As depicted in Plato's Crito dialogue, Socrates had been convicted by a jury of 500 Athenians of impiety and of corrupting the young. He was sentenced to die by drinking hemlock. His friend Crito tried to convince him to escape rather than to accept the immoral judgement of the Athenian state (Socrates had not corrupted the young but educated them.) Socrates responded by pointing out that he had lived in Athens as an Athenian citizen, accepting all of the benefits of its government and laws. On this basis, he had a type of "Social Contract" obligation to continue to accept the Athen's laws and legal judgement. He saw this as a moral obligation, even if the judgment at hand was itself immoral. Thus, for Socrates, and Plato, the law has its own morality, even when its results are immoral.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“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.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“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.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“not just words, but words that carry the force of the state.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“Law, like taxes in the words of the great judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, is the price of civilization.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“The true stronger argument is the argument that meets some objective test of strength, and that should win.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“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.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“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.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“3.2 Argue for Procedural Benefit: To Win on Substance, Maximize Your Procedural Advantage Good lawyers, like good athletes, know that small sources of advantage are important. Each of those small sources of advantage makes our chances of winning greater, and if there are a lot of them, they make our chances of winning much greater.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“As I have stressed repeatedly, the law, like other rules, is by its nature incomplete. Within the legal system, we use the mechanism of interpretation, often carried out by courts, to complete it in particular cases—to determine how to apply it to particular cases. In order to apply the law consistently, it must be interpreted consistently. Incompleteness is a problem not just of statutes and contracts, but also of the common law. Indeed, we can understand the common law as a mechanism for incremental decentralized completion of incomplete legal rules.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“Imagine a primitive group of village elders faced with a problem or a dispute. Anthropologists report that they will often turn to precedent—how did we deal with this last time?—in order to determine how to deal with it this time. This is one of the reasons elders have these decision-making roles—they have greater knowledge of precedent than the younger generation. The wisdom of elders is, in part, based on experience.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“Mere legal rules can never hope to achieve more than an approximation of substantive justice,”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“Where your arguments are this good, it is often strategically advisable to lay them out in detail, even though doing so gives your opponent a chance to respond.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“The analysis breaks the prohibition or requirement into component conditions then sequentially evaluates whether each condition is met. The synthesis merely observes whether each condition is met. It’s simple.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“allowing societies to overcome cooperation problems so that they can create public goods or prevent individuals from doing harm to one another. Law is essential to our character as a social animal and to humanity’s ability to improve its welfare.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“The important point here is the temporal one. Laws (and contracts) are prepared in advance to control later behavior. Legislation is the mechanism by which societies agree in advance about what to do to prevent or affect specified behavior.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“Lawyers are trained to think in terms of legal right and legal wrong (which is one of the things that people find objectionable about them).”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“Second, law facilitates relationships in our increasingly complex society. We live in a dense society with complicated relationships and complex production of complex goods and services. While this complexity sometimes is dispiriting, it allows us to have efficient production and to have a better material life. Law, along with other rules, helps us to manage complexity. It allows us to have more complex relationships, allowing us to be more productive.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“It turns out that we as individuals and we as societies have many values, and there are often areas in which our values are inconsistent with one another. This is why the framing strategy discussed in the prior section is always available. Moreover, when we make rules, we often fail to anticipate all the ways in which the values we seek to implement could conflict with other values and all the ways in which the rules made now could conflict with other rules made earlier or later.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“This is a favorite game of the law professor: to bait an unsuspecting law student into explaining how a particular legal outcome is “just.” You should decline to attempt to defend that ground: the answer to the professor is that the legal outcome may well be unjust, at least in terms of substantive justice. Mere legal rules can never hope to achieve more than an approximation of substantive justice, and determining an outcome’s justice is not part of the legal profession. (It is the duty of each of us as citizens, but that is not the subject of this book.)”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“Facts can be appreciated in different ways, and support for a proposition is often in the eye of the beholder.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“Mark Twain put it, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“many legal systems make it a rule to decline to enforce certain types of oral agreements.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, “the mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win

“the Supreme Court of the United States has found that a woman’s right to determine whether to have an abortion is a constitutionally-protected privacy right. (Some hope that this precedent will be overturned.)”
― Joel P. Trachtman, The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win