Name: How to win an argument (at the US Supreme Court, or anywhere) | Neal Katyal
Uploaded: 2020-10-23T18:16:55.000Z
Duration: 16 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I stood in the Supreme Court to argue my first case.

Adverbs of degree

one of the most important cases the Supreme Court had ever heard.

It considered whether Guantanamo was constitutional,

and whether the Geneva Conventions applied to the war on terror.

It was just a handful of years after the horrific attacks

The Supreme Court had seven Republican appointees

and my client happened to be Osama bin Laden's driver.

My opponent was the Solicitor General of the United States,

the Senate, for the first time since the Civil War,

passed a bill to try and remove the case from the docket of the Supreme Court.

I'm supposed to build tension and not tell you what happens.

Today, I'm going to talk about how to win an argument,

The conventional wisdom is that you speak with confidence.

I think confidence is the enemy of persuasion.

Same thing with Supreme Court arguments --

We don't just have a system in which the justices write questions

I want to take you behind the scenes to tell you what I did,

Not just for winning an argument in court,

Now obviously, it's going to involve practice,

My first practice session for Guantanamo,

and had all these legendary professors throwing questions at me.

And even though I had read everything, rehearsed a million times,

read every book, rehearsed a million times,

he was an acting coach, he wasn't even a lawyer.

He'd never set foot in the Supreme Court.

And he came into my office one day wearing a billowy white shirt

and he looked at me with my folded arms and said,

that you don't think this is going to work,

I said, "No, but my argument is on a legal pad."

And he could see the smile starting to form

But truthfully, I still got nervous as the argument date approached.

was about getting into someone else's shoes

So I did something outside of my comfort zone.

but a bracelet that my father had worn his whole life,

until he passed away, just a few months before the argument.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How to win an argument (at the US Supreme Court, or anywhere) | Neal Katyal

desperate

practice

term

realize