The power of context

• Author: Benjamin Zarnett
• Pages: 3-9

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BENJAMIN ZARNETT, LSM

Much has been written, from many dierent perspectives,

about good advocacy. Experienced advocates have described

their own habits and practices, implicitly inviting emulation.

Judges have pointed out what impresses them. Still others have detailed

the misadventures of bad advocates, suggesting the possibility that one

can reverse-engineer a good advocate by avoiding the pitfalls of an atro-

cious one.1

One comes away from reading about good advocacy struck by the

variety of things one could or should do to achieve it. That impression

is reinforced, at least for me, by years of working with and litigating

against advocates who are superb yet who have dierent intellectual

backgrounds, personalities and natural gifts, and who apply dierent

skills. Yet despite the variety there is, for me, a certain mode of thinking,

a core belief, that seems to be shared by those who excel in advocacy. To

be a good advocate, one must believe in the power of context.

Context is the raw material of advocacy. It consists, to name only

a few examples, of those facts that put bad facts in perspective; of the

language in other parts of the contract that illuminates a contentious

term’s meaning; of the array of indicators of legislative meaning that

helps to interpret the statutory provision in question; of those facts that

1 Some of the best writing on advocacy is collected in Ethos, Pathos, and Logos: The

Best of the Advocates’ Society Journal, 1982–2004 (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2005).