Legal Jargon in Court Means More Guilty Verdicts
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How does legal jargon affect jury decisions?
Prepare to have your mind blown as we delve into the complexities of relationships, explore the cutting edge of science, and celebrate the bizarre and beautiful absurdity of the world around us. This is The Last Show with David Cooper. Courtroom drama, fascinating. But how do cases get decided? What if verdicts don't just depend on evidence, but also on whether jurors can understand the language that lawyers use? A new study suggests excessively complicated legal jargon in the courtroom can influence jurors to vote guilty. How can that be right? We're here with someone who's done research on this. Her name is Olivia Bullock, and she's an advertising professor at University of Florida. Olivia, welcome to the show.
What does Olivia Bullock's research reveal about courtroom language?
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
I've never actually sat on a jury, but when I think of a courtroom, I picture like a sacred legal language, like Latin phrases, dense terminology, complicated speeches. Your research says all that might be distorting justice. What did you actually find?
Yeah, that's a great question. So the idea for this study came because I was actually watching Forensic Files, like the late night TV show that's all about crime drama. I was watching it and I realized that there is a ton of jargon that's present when we talk about legal proceedings. I usually study jargon in health and science context, so I hadn't thought about it in the context of the legal system. But when I was watching forensic files, I realized there's people in a trial proceeding who are really, really familiar with the terminology being used. And you refer to like Latin and we think of like mens rea ad hominem, you know. there's eminent domain there's people who are really familiar with that language like the lawyers on the cases the judges the expert witnesses and then there are the people in the room who this might be their first time ever hearing words like that before members of the jury and even the defendant themselves and i found myself really curious about what that knowledge gap or that familiarity gap might be doing for people who are actually trying to take part in legal proceedings
And so I ran an experimental study where I exposed people to trial transcripts that either contained legal jargon or had those legal jargon terms spelled out in plain language and asked people how they would vote to decide on those cases. And what I found was that people who saw the legal jargon condition were much more likely to say that they would vote guilty in those cases.
I don't know why, but this feels almost counterintuitive to me.
Why do jurors feel more inclined to vote guilty with complex language?
Like for me, confusion, I would think would lead to hesitation, not to certainty around guilt. Why do you think this happens?
Yeah, it's a great question. So one of the things that I think is at play there is, I think you're right, that sometimes when we're uncertain, we can default to the status quo, which in this case would be presuming that somebody is innocent, right? Because we have this presumption of innocence until proven otherwise. But what I found in this study was that there's something that happens when our processing of information is disrupted. As humans, we really like to process things at like a surface superficial level. Imagine when you go to the grocery store, you're kind of on autopilot, right? You're like going through the aisles, you're picking the things that you know, you might pick up some things that are like cool colors or logos, but you're not really thinking super effortfully about your experience.
And that's because as humans, we're motivated to not be super effortful. We don't want to waste our resources. This goes back to our days of evolution. We're motivated to keep things sort of as light as possible. So when our processing is disrupted by something like complex language, we look for a reason why that happened. And we're really sensitive to the feelings that that disruption brings up in us, those feelings of bad or I don't like this.
What are the implications of confusion in jury verdicts?
But we're super, super uncalibrated when it comes to identifying the source.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
How does legal jargon affect jury decisions?
0:03–0:54
2
What does Olivia Bullock's research reveal about courtroom language?
0:54–2:38
3
Why do jurors feel more inclined to vote guilty with complex language?
2:38–3:50
4
What are the implications of confusion in jury verdicts?
3:50–4:55
5
How can simplifying legal language improve jury understanding?
4:55–5:57
6
What recommendations does Olivia Bullock have for legal professionals?
5:57–7:01
7
How does jargon affect trust in the judicial system?
7:01–9:55
Speakers
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