Abstract
Court advocacy in England and Wales, and the United States, has, over the last three centuries, been very fluid and remains so. It certainly did not develop according to an overriding logical plan, but has grown piecemeal and at an uneven pace, the result of a complex interplay of many influences. An attempt is made to identify as many of these, chronologically, as possible. A non exhaustive list of principal factors , the relative importance of each has varied over time, includes: the effect on juniors of successful styles and approaches used by senior advocates; judicial tastes for the advocacy of lawyers, especially in the absence of jurors, when it is usually for the practical and the unadorned; changes in court procedure made by judges; reforms in the law of evidence concerning who and what may be put before courts and informing the content of submissions made; alterations in civil and criminal procedure and in the substantive law; the amount of media reporting of court cases; public and press opinion about the acceptable limits of advocates’ tactics and oratory; the forming, by advocates, of professional rules of conduct and how much they are followed; levels of respect and civility between the bench and the bar; the standing of the judiciary and its power to control proceedings in court; the extent to which juries are used in trials and the social origins of those serving on them; greater education of jurors and less susceptibility by them to melodramatic appeals to emotion; awareness by advocates that in addressing juries they have to take into account contemporary use of language and, when making allusions, draw on popular culture, itself far from still, formed by newspapers, novels, radio, films, television and increasingly the computer internet; the school educational curriculum, which has substantially evolved, usually received by lawyers and judges; general styles of public speaking and discourse in society; the formal teaching of advocacy, only introduced comparatively recently; and a relationship, although not a simplistic one, between quality of advocacy and the amount parties and the state are prepared to pay for it. New technology will, very probably, exert a strong influence on future forensic oratory. Recent widening of the pool of advocates may also be important.