The first chapter celebrates advocacy: that controversial legal issues are decided in court after reasoned argument in which the participants refrain (usually) from shouting, personal insults or threats, and the points on each side of the debate are tested for their relevance, their accuracy, and their strength. The art of persuasion is now less valued in politics, but it remains of central importance to law. This chapter seeks to identify the central characteristics of good and bad advocacy with the aid of examples from courtrooms here and abroad. Though none of them will identify the machine by the secret use of which it was said that the nineteenth-century advocate, James Scarlett (later Lord Abinger), “could always make the head of a judge nod assent to his propositions”.