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

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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.