Monday, April 9, 2007

Trial Technologies Reading List 1

My explicit exploration of alternative trial technologies started, believe it or not, with "The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists" (Neil Strauss). Jennifer bought it for my dad, and it was such a well-packaged book (black leatherette binding with red ribbon page marker, like a Bible) that I read through it. Reading it, I thought "what works to pick up women should work to influence juries. This led me to "Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming" (Richard Bandler, John Grinder). I had read about hypnotist Milton Erickson, so I went back from NLP to "My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson, M.D." (W. W. Norton & Company). I bought and explored a stack of other NLP / hypnosis books, but these are the ones that I recommend as a starting point for an exploration of deliberate induction of trance states. I say "deliberate" because the common element among the most effective argument, the most effective cross-examination, and the most effective direct examination is that at least one participant in each case is in a trance, even unintentionally. Even though we often notice it, we generally don't recognize it as a trance -- for example, we see a lawyer who is giving the argument of his life, and we say that he is "in the zone."

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