Criminal Advocacy

This is a demanding course—on your time, on your mind and on your emotions. The field work—working with the client, investigating the case, interviewing witnesses, preparing for and going to court—calls for single-minded devotion to your client; the in-class work requires thoughtfulness, courage and open-mindedness.

This is a course about you, because all advocacy begins with that—with who you are. There are three basic interrelated facets of this course: (1) three-person teams will each represent a person who has been accused of committing a crime (the venue is Roxbury District Court); (2) participants will attend a 3+ hour class twice a week to work on, among other things, advocacy skills and the mechanics of representing clients; and (3) through extensive reading and role playing, and through self-exploration exercises, participants will dig into themselves, explore who they are as persons, to find the source of their own personal power as advocates.

The readings are lengthy and essential. The role-playing exercises demand serious out-of-class preparation. In-class participation is unavoidable (no hiding, just like in a courtroom). Register only after considering all of this. Students should read, before registering, the instructor's article, "Learning to Fight Against the Death Penalty at the Trial Lawyers College" (posted on TWEN), to get a more concrete sense of what is expected.

If nothing else, you'll learn from this article that if you expect or want to learn a "bag of tricks" in the hopes of becoming an effective trial lawyer, then you ought not register for this course. This course is designed to heighten our consciousness of what it means to be persuasive, what it feels like to be prepared for courtroom battle and what is entailed (intellectually and emotionally) in representing indigent criminal defendants. The course will not turn you into Clarence Darrow; and that's a good thing, because no course could turn Clarence Darrow into you. There will be a mandatory advocacy exercise (most likely a mock trial) at the end of the term.

For more information contact:
Professor Daniel R. Williams
(617) 373-5986
d.williams@neu.edu