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Both Aristotle and Cicero acknowledge that judicial rhetoric is also known as forensic rhetoric.
This particular rhetorical style and inquiry examine “what is just” (Cicero, De Inventione Book II 25). Aristotle explains that with judicial rhetoric the advocate, muralist, and audience examine circumstances, motives, and actions of the past in order to prosecute or defend based upon “what has been done,” and its ends are the nature of the “just [dikaion] and the unjust,” as well as the “other considerations incidental to these [ends]” (Aristotle 48-49). Additionally, both Aristotle and Cicero provide future rhetors and advocates with a collection of topics that assist with the process of argument invention.
In his discussion on the different aspects of argument, Cicero lists the issues as conjectural, definitional, qualitative, and translative. He concludes that one of the issues will “always” be “applicable to any case; for where none applies, there can be no controversy” (Book I 21). Balkin notes that Cicero’s explication of the general topics in Topica and De Inventione were written “for the benefit of advocates.” As such, Cicero provided advocates with two separate heuristics: “to analyze a factual situation as a legal problem” and “to devise arguments for interpreting the law and applying it to a case in one way rather than another” (par. 10).
Virginia Chappell recognizes that for judicial rhetoric, the audience takes on the role of the jury, which is “empanelled to enact the values of a larger public by deciding whether and to what degree a set of evidence matches legal definitions of criminal behavior or civil liability” and engages in the rhetorical act of determining “correct judgements” (391).
Cicero concludes that the procedural (translative) issue occurs when it becomes “necessary to transfer the action to another court because the proper person does not bring the action, or it is not brought against the proper person or before the proper court, or under the proper statute, or with a proper request for penalty, or with the proper accusation, or at the proper time” (Book II 219). Chappell notes that the transfer from the semi-public courtroom to the streets underscores the primary goal of judicial rhetoric as “the articulation of public knowledge and public values” via Aristotle’s “arguments in popular terms” (391).