The legal world sometimes seems like it's the ideal world. It's a sphere where the good and the bad fight it out and in the end (hopefully) justice, and the good, triumph. However the legal argumentation is not free from subjectivity and story-telling. Though we have discussed earlier in the semester how personal accounts are often seen as not substantial, the account a lawyer tells the jury and the courtroom is also in a way, personal. The defendant and the plaintiff bring their side of the facts. Meaning, although both parties may be discussing and recounting the same event, their different variations of the truth of the event gives the facts of the story meaning and reputability. The "truth of the matter" is not so easy to parse out. And often times, there are multiple truths and hundreds of vantage points. Despite this however, the judges and/or the jury must decide which set of facts composed in which narrative are the most convincing and the most likely to replicate the truth of the matter. Things like consistency and noncontradiction help bolster narratives. The Supreme Court tries to be consistent by using decisions made in prior cases to reference the case at hand. To rule against a prior decision may unveil a contradiction or a false adherence to objectivity. The Supreme Court tries to define things in a way which could apply to all analogous cases and in regards to questions they know are bound to come up again. Their ruling is therefore not simply in regards to the case at hand, but encapsulates a more conclusive idea of the essence of a particular law and the question it generates. For instance their ruling in FEC v Citizens United, completely altered the way money can be used in political campaigning. They didn't just allow the documentary about Clinton to be permissible, they also tackled a larger issue in the process of their decision making.
In Chapter 9, the authors of the text discuss credibility. The text remarks that credibility is not only able to serve as a claim in argumentation, but it also plays a significant role as a means to support a claim (Rieke, Sillars, & Peterson, 142). The text then goes into detail about characteristics and forms of credibility but finally goes over the general principle the authors suggest for the use of credibility. Credibility can be incredibly subjective, but there are still some general principles of credibility that can apply to most situations. The principle I found to stand out the most in the group of principles the authors presented was the principle of developing credibility from reputation. Reputation is the credibility someone possesses with decision makers before they argue (Rieke, Sillars, & Peterson, 147). When I think of reputation in argument, I always manage to think of the polarized reputation of Donald Trump. There is a significant amount of people who hat
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