The Simplification of Jury Instructions: Legal-Lay Interactions in Jury Trials

Abstract

The paper presents an empirical contribution to the area of comprehension of jury instructions, which have been intensively investigated in recent decades. By conducting a discursive analysis of the corpus of pattern jury instructions, this article discusses explanatory strategies that contribute to efficient communication in the courtroom. These explanatory strategies – definition, description, exemplification, and metaphorization – are typically employed with the aim of improving the comprehensibility of jury instructions. A paraphrasing experiment was conducted to assess the layperson’s ability to understand jury instructions before and after employing the explanatory strategies. Forty-four native Englishspeaking undergraduate and postgraduate students were asked to paraphrase pattern jury instructions containing the legal concepts “preponderance of evidence” and “circumstantial evidence”. Interpretation errors were evaluated to assess comprehension results. The results underpin the paper’s central argument that the explanatory strategies can improve the comprehensibility of legal texts indicating that efforts should be undertaken to explain abstract legal concepts to a lay audience. The pedagogical implications on the explanatory structures are also drawn.