Bloodletting and Beasts: Metaphors of Legal Violence
![handle is hein.journals/wflr49 and id is 747 raw text is: BLOODLETTING AND BEASTS: METAPHORS OF
LEGAL VIOLENCE
Sarah Higinbotham*
Research has shown that metaphors are how we make sense of
the world. They influence how we think, what we buy, and even
how we vote.1 In order to understand the role that metaphors play
in people's reasoning about crime, psychology professors Lera
Boroditsky and Paul Thibodeau gave a fictional newspaper account
to hundreds of readers, reporting that the city of Addison faced a
dramatic surge in crime in 2004, with a 19% increase in reported
crimes and a 52% increase in the murder rate.2 The statistics,
phrasing, and content of each story were identical, with a single
word exception-the metaphor:
Crime is a {beast/virus} ravaging the city of Addison. Five
years ago Addison was in good shape, with no obvious
vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, in the past five years the city's
defense systems have weakened, and the city has succumbed
to crime. Today, there are more than 55,000 criminal
incidents a year-up by more than 10,000 per year. There is a
worry that if the city does not regain its strength soon, even
more serious problems may start to develop.3
Half of the participants read that [c]rime is a [beast] ravaging
the city of Addison and half read that [c]rime is a [virus] ravaging
* Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, Georgia Institute of
Technology, PhD, Georgia State University. I would like to thank Jonathan
Cardi and the participants of the Wake Forest Law Review's Spring 2014
Colloquium, Law as Violence: An Interdisciplinary Conversation. Thanks also
to Jonathan Simon for his compelling work on Brown v. Plata and to Seth
Hagen, Joe Kelly, and Bill Taft for their helpful comments.
1. See generally GEORGE LAKOFF & MARK JOHNSON, PHILOSOPHY IN THE
FLESH: THE EMBODIED MIND AND ITS CHALLENGE TO WESTERN THOUGHT (1999);
THE POWER OF METAPHOR: EXAMINING ITS INFLUENCE ON SOcIAL LIFE (Mark J.
Landau et al. eds., 2014); Swee Hoon Ang & Elison Ai Ching Lim, The Influence
of Metaphors and Product Type on Brand Personality Perceptions and Attitudes,
35 J. ADVERTISING 39 (2006); Mark J. Landau et al., A Metaphor-Enriched
Social Cognition, 136 PSYCHOL. BULL. 1045 (2010).
2. Paul H. Thibodeau & Lera Boroditsky, Metaphors We Think with: The
Role of Metaphor in Reasoning, 6 PLOS ONE 1, 3 (2011).
3. Id. at 3.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/wflr49&div=31&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Bloodletting and Beasts: Metaphors of Legal Violence
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