Comparative Study on Rhetoric Skills in Courts and Negotiation-Japan and Britain

1.在日本的法庭上，法官在听取律师就有关法律的问题进行激烈的辩论后宣布最后的判决是不寻常的，因为他们在民事纠纷中考虑当事人律师提交的文件作出判决，而在刑事案件中，他们似乎没有遇到困难，对大多数已经承认有罪的被告作出判决。在这方面，法庭上的修辞技巧对普通执业律师来说并不重要。在家事法庭调解的情况下，修辞技巧似乎对家事法庭调解员解决当事人之间的困难关系更为重要。家事法庭调解的核心原则是当事人自行决定。因此，家事法庭调解员的主要作用是帮助当事人了解他们的情况，谈论他们的问题，并帮助他们达成协议。为了达到这一目的，调解人往往会运用自己的修辞技巧，这些技巧都是基于其长期的调解经验.在英国，诉讼中修辞技巧的发展反映了三百多年来律师为打赢重罪案件所作的努力。特别是在世纪，他们在法庭上雄辩地恳求陪审员同情他们的当事人。然而，律师们发现，陪审员--普通人--并不熟悉雄辩的辞藻，于是他们倾向于在诉讼中使用平实的、当下的语言。这种倾向似乎在律师中普遍存在，特别是当他们在ADR环境中，当事人-外行人-通过他们作为普通人的技能来处理他们的争议时。

1. It is unusual to observe in Japanese courts that judges declare final decisions after hearing fierce exchange of statements by the lawyers on relevant legal issues, since they make judgment in civil disputes considering the documents submitted by the parties' lawyers and in criminal cas es they seem not to face difficulties to make decision to the defendants most of who have admitted guilty. In this respect, rhetoric skills in the court are not regarded important to ordinary practicing lawyers.2. In the case of family court mediation, rhetoric skills seem to be more crucial for the family court mediator for sorting out difficult relationships of the parties. The core principle of family court mediation is 'self-decision' by the parties. Therefore, the main role of family court mediators is to support the parties to understand their situation, to talk about their issues, and to help them to reach an agreement. In order to achieve such objects, the mediators often use their own rhetoric skills based on their long experience as a mediator.3. In Britain, developments in rhetoric skills in litigations reflect the efforts by the lawyers for wining their cases of felony trials for more than three hundred years. In the nineteenth century, in particular, they pleaded eloquently in the court room for attracting the jurors' sympathy to their clients. The lawyers, however, found that eloquent rhetoric was not familiar to jurors - ordinary people, and then they tended to use plain and current language in litigation. Such tendency seems to be wide spread among lawyers, in particular when they commit ADR settings in which the parties - lay people - deal with their dispute by their own skills as an ordinary people.