Some trial lawyers are remembered for their verdicts. Irving Younger is remembered for teaching the rest of us how to cross-examine, and two generations later his voice is still the one many of us first learned it from.
Younger’s own career ran through nearly every seat in a courtroom. He was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, then an elected judge of the New York City Civil Court, and finally a teacher, the Samuel S. Leibowitz Professor of Trial Techniques at Cornell and later a professor at the University of Minnesota. He had done the work before he taught it, and it showed.
His most famous lecture gave the trial bar what everyone now calls the Ten Commandments of Cross-Examination. They are a discipline, not a script. Be brief. Use short questions and plain words. Ask only leading questions. Never ask a question you do not already know the answer to. Listen to the answer. Do not quarrel with the witness. Do not let the witness simply repeat the direct examination. Do not let the witness explain. Do not ask the one question too many. And save the ultimate point for summation.
The thread running through all ten is control, and the courage to stop. A cross-examination is not a performance, and it is not an argument with the witness. It is a series of short, leading statements the witness can only confirm, built so the point is made and then left alone. Younger’s hardest lesson was the ninth, the one question too many, the question that hands the witness a chance to undo everything by explaining. The disciplined lawyer makes the point on the facts and sits down, and makes the argument later, to the jury, where it belongs.
That is why his lecture still plays on a laptop screen late at night. The craft he taught is transmissible, and it does not age. A young lawyer watching him learns the difference between examining a witness and merely talking at one, and an experienced lawyer is reminded of the restraint that is easy to forget in the heat of a trial. He has been gone since 1988, and he is still one of the best teachers in the room.
Irving Younger (1932 to 1988). Assistant U.S. Attorney, Southern District of New York; Judge, New York City Civil Court; Samuel S. Leibowitz Professor of Trial Techniques at Cornell Law School and later a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. His “Ten Commandments of Cross-Examination” come from his classic lecture on the art of cross-examination, still widely circulated. This is general information, not legal advice.
