Under Questioning

Four ways to lose an argument, ranked by a Roman in AD 95 — and walked down in order by the defence at Nuremberg.

A course on the thought of Nuremberg.

Rhetoric

What you will learn

State what a stasis is, and why every dispute has exactly one.
Identify the ground a speaker has chosen from their opening rather than from their conclusion.
Explain why the conjectural stasis was largely unavailable at Nuremberg, and what replaced it.
Recognise a non-responsive answer by testing it against the question it would have answered.
State the definitional stasis, and why evidence about the act cannot settle it.
Reconstruct the distinction the tribunal drew between incitement and propaganda from its own findings.
Identify a quality argument by what it concedes rather than by what it claims.
Explain why tu quoque is an argument about the accuser, and what it can and cannot win.

Where the dispute actually is — Before anyone argues, something has to be decided that is not part of the argument: what the argument is about. Quintilian says the failure to do this is the commonest fault in advocacy, and gives it…
Whether it happened, and whether you knew — The lowest rung of the ladder is the strongest: deny it. At Nuremberg that rung was gone before the trial started, so the question of fact moved somewhere stranger — into the defendants' own heads.
What to call it — On the same morning, in the same room, the tribunal considered two men whose entire offence consisted of words. It hanged one and acquitted the other, and the line it drew between them is still the…
Granted, and here is why — The third rung concedes the act and the name and argues the act was right. Quintilian calls it the most honourable of the defences. At Nuremberg it produced the only argument the tribunal partly…
You are the wrong court — The fourth ground is not about the act at all. Quintilian puts it last and calls it the only remaining hope of safety. The Nuremberg defence opened with it, on the first day, before a word of…
Know your witness — Jackson's cross-examination of Göring is generally judged a failure. Quintilian, writing eighteen centuries earlier, had told him exactly what not to do — and the man who got it right was in the same…

Institutio Oratoria — Quintilian's twelve-book training of an orator, finished around AD 95 after twenty years of teaching; Book III sets out the four points a dispute can rest on and Book V how to question a witness.
De Inventione — Cicero's early handbook, the route by which the Greek doctrine of stasis reached the Latin world and then the modern one.
Trial of the Major War Criminals — The official record of the International Military Tribunal — every word spoken in the courtroom between November 1945 and October 1946, printed in full.

stasis, conjecture, definition, quality, translatio, the defence ladder, responsiveness

Part of the Simposeum course library.