Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: As Japanese Diet approved the bills concerning lay participation in criminal judicial decision making in May 2004, how do lay persons understand legal instructions and descriptions of the facts of legal cases which are described in so-called "legalese" is one of the questions of growing concern in recent Japan. In the context of psychological studies on jurors' behaviours, a line of academic efforts are devoted to jurors’ capacity of understanding legal instructions and/or documentation. For example, Severance, Greene, & Loftus (1984) examined the effects of patterns of judicial instructions. They reported the forms of instructions do affect jurors’ understandings of legal concept and their decision making. Also, Wiener, Pritchard, & Weston (1995) found that revision of the instructions made little improvement on jurors’ understandings and that miscomprehension strongly related with willingness to impose the death penalty.
In our study, focusing on the effects of using “legalese”, we examine effects of "legalese" on intelligibility and accuracy of memory with the methods of psychological experiment. 　In the experiment, we present some forms of descriptions of concise summary of a legal case and judicial instructions to participants. We prepare three conditions in the experiment: a) presenting in comprehensive words condition, b) presenting in "legalese" with comprehensive explanation condition, and c) presenting in only "legalese" condition. The participants are Japanese university students who are awarded course credits with participating (or who voluntarily participate) in the experiment. In our presentation, we present the results of the experiment and discuss the effects of using "legalese".