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22 Hofstra L. Rev. 37 (1993-1994)
Reforming the Language of Jury Instructions

handle is hein.journals/hoflr22 and id is 47 raw text is: REFORMING THE LANGUAGE OF JURY INSTRUCTIONS Peter Meijes Tiersma* CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION ............................. 38 II. THE EVIDENCE ............................. 41 A. Empirical Studies of Jurors' Comprehension of Instructions ................ 41 B. What Makes Jury Instructions Difficult to Comprehend? ..................... 44 C. The Charrow Study ....................... 46 1. Overuse of Nominalizations .............. 48 2. Use of As To ........................ 48 3. Misplaced Phrases ..................... 49 4. Deletion of Relative Pronouns and the Following Verb .................. 49 5. Technical or Legal Lexical Items ........... 49 6. Failure to Use Modal Verbs .............. 50 7. Use of Double or Triple Negatives .......... 50 8. Use of Passives in Subordinate Clauses ....... 51 9. Poor Discourse Structure ................. 51 10. Too Many Embeddings .................. 51 III. THE RESPONSE BY THE PROFESSION ............... 52 A. The Courts ............................ 52 1. The Legal Standard for Evaluating Jury Instructions .............. 52 * Professor of Law, Loyola Law School. J.D. 1986, Boalt Hall; Ph.D. 1980, University of California at San Diego. I am grateful for comments from Robert Charrow, David Leon- ard, Samuel Pillsbury, and Jamison Wilcox. A portion of this Article was presented at the 1993 meeting of the Law and Society Association. My thanks to all those who attended and made comments at that time, and to Leslie Nathan for valuable research assistance. I am also indebted to Judith Levi for making bibliographic information available to me.

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