The thrust of this article is to address the apparently growing tendency of trial judges in family part cases to deny requests for oral argument in favor of returning motions on the papers. While it may be a time-saver of sorts, the practice eliminates important dimensions of cases that could otherwise be flushed out in oral argument.
Historically, when Daniel Webster and other lawyers argued Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824), before the United States Supreme Court, they took five days to do it. See, e.g., William H. Rehnquist, From Webster to Word-Processing: The Ascendance of the Appellate Brief, 1 J. App. Prac. & Process 1, 3 (1999).
