Making Your Case

Making Your Case, by Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner, is a practical guide to written and oral advocacy aimed at lawyers, law students, and anyone who must persuade a legal audience. The book draws on Scalia's decades as a federal judge and Supreme Court justice and Garner's career as a legal-writing authority, offering rules and illustrations rather than abstract theory. The authors organize their advice around the two settings where advocates actually work: the brief and the oral argument. In the writing sections, they stress that a brief must tell a story, that the statement of facts is often the most persuasive part, and that points should be ordered by strength rather than chronology. They urge writers to choose credible arguments over merely available ones, to address the strongest opposing position head-on, and to treat every assertion as something a skeptical judge will test. Garner's influence appears in the emphasis on clear sentences, strong verbs, and removing clutter. The oral-argument chapters advise advocates to prepare for interrupted questioning, answer the judge's actual question, concede weakness where necessary, and never read from a script. Scalia adds commentary on how judges think and what irritates them, which gives the advice a distinctive insider perspective. The book's most memorable feature is its structure as a numbered list of concrete rules, each paired with examples, many drawn from real briefs and opinions. It closes with a celebrated section of "antipatterns" illustrating common mistakes. Rather than promising universal persuasion techniques, it teaches how legal persuasion specifically works in courts.