(You might also call it a kernel.) The trick is to identify it, express it, and be ruthless about defending it. Those six characteristics, which the Heath brothers combine into the handy mnemonic "SUCCESs": In the course of their investigation, they identify six characteristics of "sticky" ideas–that is, ideas that stay in your head, and stay with other people as well. Dan and Chip Heath, in their business bestseller Made to Stick, investigated why certain urban myths (like the " Kidney Heist," in which a traveling businessman comes to after a wild night in Vegas to find himself occupying an ice-filled bathtub, sans kidneys) stick around, while other demonstrably true facts just don’t penetrate our brains. (I discussed some of this before here.)īut that terrain can be modified. The plaintiffs are human beings the defendants are usually faceless corporations. Class actions themselves bring certain rhetorical advantages to litigation.
This is what I think he means by "rhetorical advantage." And that has important implications for class-action practice.Īmong other things, it explains why certain rhetorical strategies recur in class-action practice. (Call it "culture," if you like.) And those shared assumptions will make certain arguments seem more intuitive than others. Any given group, be it appellate court justices on a particular circuit, or the jury pool of a particular area, has a set of shared assumptions and beliefs. And, to this practicing lawyer, that makes a lot of sense. What makes Professor Sunstein’s usage in Outrage so interesting is that he describes rhetorical advantage more as a feature of terrain than a deliberate strategy.
In it, I mentioned that he discussed (albeit very briefly) an interesting idea, " rhetorical advantage." So, what does the term actually mean for folks interested in legal strategy?
Last month, I wrote about an old article of Professor Cass Sunstein’s, on Outrage.
0 kommentar(er)
