ABSTRACT
Although I have not framed my topic as a question – ‘Has advocacy a future?’, or something like that – I don’t want it to be thought that I am taking advocacy for granted. For many people, especially those who have had a bad experience of the law, advocates are a menace: they complicate and prolong things which ought to be short and simple; they obscure rather than clarify the issues; they bully and perplex witnesses who are doing their best to tell the truth. To their clients the same advocates, equally often, are heroes who run rings round the opposition and expose its witnesses as fools or frauds; though the litigant’s desire to win can sometimes obscure the reality remarked on by a celebrated Italian advocate: ‘Often the client doesn’t realise when he wins his case that rather than embracing his own lawyer it’s his opponent’s lawyer he should be thanking.’1
