Advocating communicative confidence: empowering law students to be 'water-walkers'

Abstract

This paper proposes that the secret to becoming a winning advocate is a confident communicator style (Norton, 1983; Moss Kanter, 2004). The paper explores strategies that may help a law student develop the essential communicative
confidence to handle the 'Socratic Method' (Garner, 2000) and become a successful advocate. As so much of the law has to do with speaking, one such strategy is to give
students an understanding of the principles of rhetoric, including the opportunity to work on the practice of their persuasive power: both verbal and non-verbal.
The paper investigates a critique of the 'Socratic Method' (Garner, 2000), which dominates the tradition of the law in the western world. The question of the potential
of the Socratic Method to be misogynistic (Garner, 2000) is investigated to show that Socratic teaching in legal education is a daunting prospect for many students.
The case study used is an elective unit that prepares students for mooting and court work and that is currently taught at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
Law School. This paper outlines aspects of the teaching approach and uses feedback from students to analyse its effectiveness in developing communicative confidence
and overcoming the fear associated with Socratic courtroom processes.