Facts Questionnaire

Elwork, Amiram; Sales, Bruce D.; Alfini, James J.

doi:10.1037/t38295-000

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Research suggests that the cognitive tasks in jury decision-making can be difficult (Lieberman & Sales, 1997). Jurors find many legal instructions challenging to understand and apply (Elwork et al, 1982;Reifman et al, 1992). They are often presented only orally at the end of the trial evidence, and typically include substantial amounts of unfamiliar language and legalese.…”

Section: Legal Instructions and Commonsense Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

Trial by Jury: Psychological Research Contributions to an Enduring Legal Institution

Spruill

2023

Preprint

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Legal decision-making is a complex psychological process with weighty consequences. This has led some to question why a group of lay citizens with no relevant background or training in the law should decide legal cases. This chapter addresses these concerns by summarizing psychological theory and research that sheds light on how jurors approach their task and that confirms the general soundness of the jury as a fact-finding body. The chapter outlines current psychological models of decision-making that map out how individual jurors and juries come to their decisions in civil and criminal trials. It describes how the diversity of juries contributes positively to the jury’s fact-finding competence and the fairness of its decisions. The chapter also presents evidence about the effectiveness of various jury reforms, from the jury’s size and decision rule, to trial aids such as notetaking and question-asking, to instructions on the law and on implicit biases. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future jury research, including research on global systems of lay legal decision-making.

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Section: Legal Instructions and Commonsense Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

Trial by Jury: Psychological Research Contributions to an Enduring Legal Institution

Spruill

2023

Preprint

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“…The plain-language movement spurred research exploring how best to write “plain-English” layperson summaries of official legal documents, such as jury instructions (Charrow & Charrow, 1979; Diamond et al, 2012; Elwork et al, 1982; Heuer & Penrod, 1989) and Miranda warnings (Goldstein et al, 2003; Rogers et al, 2007). Many of the insights from this literature, as well as the general psycholinguistic literature, are now reflected in the Federal Plain Language Guidelines.…”

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confidence: 99%

So much for plain language: An analysis of the accessibility of U.S. federal laws over time.

Martínez,

Mollica,

Gibson

2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Over the last 50 years, there have been efforts on behalf of the U.S. government to simplify legal documents for society at large. However, there has been no systematic evaluation of how effective these effortscollectively referred to as the "plain-language movement"-have been. Here we report the results of a large-scale longitudinal corpus analysis (n ≈ 225 million words), in which we compared every law passed by congress with a comparably sized sample of English texts from four different baseline genres published during approximately the same time period. We also compared the entirety of the U.S. Code (the official compilation of all federal legislation currently in force) with a large sample of recently published texts from six baseline genres of English. We found that laws remain laden with features associated with psycholinguistic complexity-including center-embedding, passive voice, low-frequency jargon, capitalization, and sentence length-relative to the baseline genres of English, and that the prevalence of most of these features has not meaningfully declined since the initial onset of the plain-language efforts. These findings suggest top-down efforts to simplify legal texts have thus far remained largely ineffectual, despite the apparent tractability of these changes, and call into question the coherence and legitimacy of legal doctrines whose validity rests on the notion of laws being easily interpretable by laypeople. Public Significance StatementOver the last 50 years, there have been efforts on behalf of the U.S. government to simplify legal documents for society at large. How effective have these efforts been? Here we analyzed every law passed by Congress between the years 1951 to 2022 along with a large sample of baseline texts published over roughly the same time period and found that laws remain laden with features associated with processing difficulty relative to other genres, and that the prevalence of most of these features has not meaningfully declined. We found similar results when comparing laws with academic texts. These findings suggest topdown efforts to simplify legal texts have thus far remained largely ineffectual, despite the apparent tractability of these changes, raising and informing questions of law and public policy.

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Facts Questionnaire

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Trial by Jury: Psychological Research Contributions to an Enduring Legal Institution

Trial by Jury: Psychological Research Contributions to an Enduring Legal Institution

So much for plain language: An analysis of the accessibility of U.S. federal laws over time.

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