PREPARING FOR ORAL ARGUMENTS

With its multimedia capabilities, the Internet can also deliver information that you can't get anywhere else. If you're privileged enough to have a case pending before the Supreme Court, you can hear what its like to be questioned by the Justices. Go to the Oyez Web site (http://oyez.at.nwu.edu/oyez.html) and you can hear oral arguments from selected cases going back to 1961.

But the internet has more mundane uses when preparing an oral argument. Public defender R. Scott Carpenter tells of how he used the Internet to prepare for a murder trial:

Preparing for the murder trial of a man who bludgeoned his wife, I found myself unable to conjure the words that best expressed to the jury the defendant's rage, which evolved during the mutually abusive relationship and ultimately resulted in the deadly assault. Using search tools called Alta Vista and Deja News, I searched both the Web and Usenet (newsgroups). I found a goldmine of language in the vein I could not articulate in my own experience. In online discussion groups, men talked about the emotion generated by psychological abuse. Such finds yielded concise explanations of why rage erupts, like "the hope instilled by expressions of love intensifies the sense of betrayal and confusion." At sites where psychologists write about the couples they counsel, I read their descriptions of "people who engage in a mutual dance of destruction."

Like the Rap dictionary, these types of books are not the type Scott typically keeps on his shelf at home. But when he needs the resources, they are there at his fingertips, through the internet. And, no printed source can duplicate the first-hand accounts he found in the Internet discussion groups.

Go to Paul's Research Section