{"title":"Preliminary jury instructing: a dilemmatic communication practice","authors":"K. Tracy","doi":"10.1515/text-2021-0115","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study analyzes judges’ preliminary jury instruction in nine US federal civil trials. Following an overview of past and current jury instructing practices, including the role of pattern instructions, I describe the trial materials and introduce genre analysis and grounded practical theory, the two theoretical-methodological frames I use to analyze judges’ instructing. Judges’ preliminary instructions are shown to include the basic units identified in written pattern instructions. How they are performed reveals significant judge variation, and the variations make apparent difficulties built into the law that are backgrounded when solely written texts are studied. Some of these difficulties surface in judges’ description of the case and law, in orientation to note-taking, and in discussion of what is evidence and how to assess it. In concluding I argue that conceiving of high-quality jury deliberation as centrally dependent on getting instructions more comprehensible fails to recognize the fundamental judgment task that juries have. Being a good juror involves navigating communication dilemmas. Attending to the judge’s preliminary jury instructing, the paper argues, requires jurors honoring multiple principles that may be in tension.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Text & Talk","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2021-0115","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract This study analyzes judges’ preliminary jury instruction in nine US federal civil trials. Following an overview of past and current jury instructing practices, including the role of pattern instructions, I describe the trial materials and introduce genre analysis and grounded practical theory, the two theoretical-methodological frames I use to analyze judges’ instructing. Judges’ preliminary instructions are shown to include the basic units identified in written pattern instructions. How they are performed reveals significant judge variation, and the variations make apparent difficulties built into the law that are backgrounded when solely written texts are studied. Some of these difficulties surface in judges’ description of the case and law, in orientation to note-taking, and in discussion of what is evidence and how to assess it. In concluding I argue that conceiving of high-quality jury deliberation as centrally dependent on getting instructions more comprehensible fails to recognize the fundamental judgment task that juries have. Being a good juror involves navigating communication dilemmas. Attending to the judge’s preliminary jury instructing, the paper argues, requires jurors honoring multiple principles that may be in tension.
期刊介绍:
Text & Talk (founded as TEXT in 1981) is an internationally recognized forum for interdisciplinary research in language, discourse, and communication studies, focusing, among other things, on the situational and historical nature of text/talk production; the cognitive and sociocultural processes of language practice/action; and participant-based structures of meaning negotiation and multimodal alignment. Text & Talk encourages critical debates on these and other relevant issues, spanning not only the theoretical and methodological dimensions of discourse but also their practical and socially relevant outcomes.