Using legal language as a non-lawyer: Danish lay judges’ linguistic strategies during criminal trials

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

Lay participation in criminal trials has primarily been studied in common law systems, thereby mainly focusing on the separate role of juries. These studies have provided detailed accounts of language use between jurors during deliberation as well as their use of storytelling techniques and common-sense reasoning in decision-making. However, only few studies have focused on the linguistic learning processes that lay judges in other legal systems go through when they deliberate cases together with a professional judge both in reaching a verdict and in sentencing. In Denmark, lay judges are appointed for a period of four years, and this paper presents findings from an ethnographic study of lay judges and their growing experience with interactions in the deliberation room. It argues that lay judges learn to use legal language in order to strengthen their arguments vis-à-vis the professional judges. Lay judges feel that their influence is dependent on how well they master new, legal context-specific ways of expressing themselves, a point that may run counter to their legitimation as lay voices in an otherwise formalized judiciary.

Original languageEnglish
JournalNordic Journal of Linguistics
Volume41
Issue number2
Pages (from-to)227-246
Number of pages20
ISSN0332-5865
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018

Bibliographical note

Special Issue 2 Forensic Linguistics: European Perspectives

    Research areas

  • communities of practice, criminal trials, discourse analysis, lay judges, legal language, situated learning

ID: 191556270