In 1818 a lawyer stood before the Supreme Court to defend a small college against a state that wanted to swallow it, and he ended not with law but with a sentence about love.
Daniel Webster argued for Dartmouth, his own college, against New Hampshire's move to seize its charter and turn a private school into a state one. The legal question was dry: was a corporate charter a contract the state could not break. Webster spent hours proving that it was, in the tight, unglamorous way that actually wins cases.
Then he stopped arguing and started speaking. "It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it." By the account that has come down to us, the room went still and Chief Justice Marshall's eyes filled. Whether every detail of that story is true, the Court ruled for the college, and the Contract Clause has shielded private charters ever since.
Here is the craft. Webster did not win on the feeling. He won on the law, argued cold and complete, and then spent one sentence reminding the Court that the dry contract in front of them held a living thing. The emotion was the last brick, not the building. Lead with the sentence about love and you are a sentimentalist. Earn it first with the law, and it lands like a verdict.
Do the unglamorous work until the argument is airtight, and save the human sentence for the end, where it does the most and costs the least.
Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819); Webster's peroration is preserved in the account of Chauncey A. Goodrich, who heard the argument.
