I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. You would think that the strength and substance of a legal argument matters the most when you argue before the highest court in the land, the U.S. Supreme Court. And technically that's true. But as Supreme Court litigator, Neil Katyal tells us in today's TED 2020 talk, the way you make your arguments really make a difference when it comes to the power of persuasion.

Even if you and I never go before the nine justices, what Katyal shares about his communication strategies are something all of us can use.

14 years ago, I stood in the Supreme Court to argue my first case. And it wasn't just any

case. It was a case that experts called one of the most important cases the Supreme Court

had ever heard. It considered whether Guantanamo was constitutional and whether the Geneva

conventions applied to the war on terror. It was just a handful of years after the horrific

attacks of September 11th, the Supreme Court had seven Republican appointees and two Democratic

ones, and my client happened to be Osama bin Laden's driver. My opponent was a Solicitor General of the

United States, America's top courtroom lawyer. He'd argued 35 cases. I wasn't even 35 years old.

And to make matters worse, the Senate for the first time since the Civil War passed a bill

to try and remove the case from the docket of the

Supreme Court. Now, the speaking coaches say, I'm supposed to build tension and not tell you what

happens. But the thing is, we want. How? Today, I'm going to talk about how to win an argument

at the Supreme Court or anywhere. The conventional wisdom is that you speak

with confidence. That's how you persuade. I think that's wrong. I think confidence is the enemy

of persuasion. Persuasion is about empathy, about getting into people's heads. That's what makes

Ted what it is. It's why you're listening

to this talk. You could have read it on the cold page, but you didn't. Same thing with Supreme Court

arguments. We write written briefs with cold pages, but we also have an oral argument. We don't

just have a system in which the justices write questions and you write answers.

Why? Because argument is about interaction. I want to take you behind the scenes to tell you what I did

and how these lessons are generalizable, not just for winning an argument in court, but for something

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