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Voice and Context in Simulated Everyday Legal Discourse: The Influence of Sex Differences and Social Ties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Calvin Morrill ,
Michelle Johnson  and
Tyler Harrison
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Abstract

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Everyday legal discourse refers to the spoken language with which ordinary people constitute the law-in-action. In this article, we experimentally investigate the social distribution of rule- and relationally-oriented discourse found by ethnographers in small-claims court settings. We examine the influences of sex differences and social ties between disputants on these types of discourse in a mock small-claims setting using a quantitative content coding scheme. We do not find empirical support for sex differences in the production of simulated everyday legal discourse. The relational context of a dispute (operationalized as the strength of social ties between disputants) has significant effects on the distribution of rule- and relationally-oriented discourse, so that disputants in relationally-close contexts produce more relationally-oriented discourse and those in relationally-distant contexts produce more rule-oriented discourses than those in relationally-close contexts. With these findings as a backdrop, we discuss (1) the contextual nature of sex differences in everyday legal discourse; (2) discourse “switching” and emotional investment in personal relationships, and (3) applications for our coding scheme to studies of disputing frames.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , 1998 , pp. 639 - 666
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 1994 Law and Society annual meeting, Phoenix, AZ, and the National Communication Association Meetings, Chicago, 1996. We thank Paula England, Scott Jacobs, Sally Jackson, Allan Lind, Linda Molm, William O'Barr, Lynn Smith-Lovin, members of the Social Psychology Seminar at the University of Arizona, and five anonymous reviewers for comments.

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