ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at courtroom discourse from a descriptive, third-person perspective. The story told in opening statement is itself the result of earlier conversations, those between lawyer and client, conversations that have their own rhetoric. Since the lawyer is ethically obliged to defer to his client's "objectives" and different factual theories of the case may have different consequences, the lawyer will be obliged, within ethical restrictions, to present that version of events that will support his client's objectives. The opening statements are, from this perspective, narrativized statements of client objectives. Facts, as presented by both lawyers, are purposes, their client's purposes. Thus the court will decide between competing purposes insofar as they can be narrativized and so presented through the lens of the community's sensus communis. The chaste narratives preserve the "forensic" character of trial rhetoric, for, to paraphrase Aristotle, narrative is the natural home of language about individual justice.
