Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2026
Abstract
The most significant contemporary advances in effective courtroom advocacy will emerge from what on the surface is an unlikely source: neuroscience. Revolutionary advances in technology for the first time allow us to see how the human brain makes decisions. The findings are wholly inconsistent with how the trial process presupposes the finder of fact will perceive and use information delivered by lawyers and witnesses. Consequently, lawyers seeking to persuade jurors (and judges) must reframe their advocacy to align with what we have learned about how the minds of these decision-makers will receive testimony and argument and use these inputs to reach their verdict.
This Article first will summarize the two signature features of the brain’s decision-making: 1) instantaneous, autonomous, and sub-conscious prediction based on comparing new inputs to past life experience, and 2) the integrated and dominant role of emotion. To coordinate the substance of what we advocate with how the mind operates, lawyers must pivot the focal point of their trial presentations away from stacking facts around the legal elements. Instead, we must tell one person’s story—one that satisfies a continuum of character, motive, and single plot and includes the human stakes. The Article further proposes the most important tactics lawyers must execute at each stage of the trial—opening statement, direct examination, cross-examination, and closing argument—to make their advocacy neurocongruent.
Recommended Citation
Gary Gildin,
Neuro-Advocacy: Harmonizing Persuasion with the Operation of the Brain, 79
Syracuse L. Rev.
599
(2026).
Available at: https://insight.dickinsonlaw.psu.edu/fac_works/526