Systems of justice based on lay juries are meant to ensure a close link between the law and the community it serves: jurors represent the values of the community and these are fed back into the legal system. However, juries can only arrive at legally fair decisions if they have managed to understand and apply the law relating to the case. Yet legal systems in common law countries have paid scant attention to whether legal instructions delivered by the judge are actually conveyed effectively to the jury. This chapter considers the process of jury instruction from linguistic and communicational perspectives. It draws a key distinction between ‘jury instructions’, or the legal texts produced by judicial committees and delivered by judges, and ‘jury instruction’, or the process of communicating the relevant law to a specific jury in the context of a specifictrial. While the comprehension of specific instructions can be improved by rewriting them in plain English, the overall process of instruction requires much more radical revision if we want to ensure that lay juries will bring in true and just verdicts which reflect both the law and the values of the community.
2024. Preliminary jury instructing: a dilemmatic communication practice. Text & Talk 44:2 ► pp. 271 ff.
Xu, Jun & Lei Ge
2023. Displaying epistemic stance through same-turn self-repair in Chinese civil courtroom interaction. Frontiers in Psychology 14
Boginskaya, Olga
2022. Popularizing in legal discourse: What efforts do Russian judges make to facilitate juror’s comprehension of law-related contents?. Discourse Studies 24:5 ► pp. 527 ff.
Hill-Madsen, Aage
2022. Transformational strategies in diaphasic translation: three case studies. Perspectives 30:4 ► pp. 643 ff.
Maguire, Edward R. & Howard Giles
2022. Public Expressions of Empathy and Sympathy by U.S. Criminal Justice Officials After Controversial Police Killings of African-Americans. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 41:1 ► pp. 49 ff.
Liu, Wenjie, Zhengrui Han, Haiqing Chen & Wei Ren
2021. Discursive practice of Chinese criminal adjudication: A genre perspective. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 86 ► pp. 69 ff.
Nkomo, Dion
2020. New Frontiers in Forensic Linguistics: Themes and Perspectives in Language and the Law in Africa and beyond. South African Journal of African Languages 40:2 ► pp. 238 ff.
Tracy, Karen & Mary Caron
2017. How the Language Style of Small-Claims Court Judges Does Ideological Work. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 36:3 ► pp. 321 ff.
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