Course Title
Jury Instruction
Professor
Judge
First Assignment
JURY INSTRUCTIONS
Syllabus
There is no textbook for this course. Instead, we will be using parts of the the following articles that the students can obtain through Westlaw or Lexis:
(1) Robert P. Charrow & Veda R. Charrow, Making Legal Language Understandable: A Psycholinguistic Study of Jury Instructions, 79 Colum. L. Rev. 1306 (1979).
(2) Jamison Wilcox, The Craft of Drafting Plain-Language Jury Instructions: A Study of a Sample Pattern Instruction on Obscenity, 59 Temp. L.Q. 1159 (1986).
(3) Neil P. Cohen, The Timing of Jury Instructions, 67 Tenn. L. Rev. 681 (2000).
(4) Peter M. Tiersma, Communicating with Juries: How to Draft More Understandable Instructions, 10 Scribes J. Legal Writing 1 (2006).
The first day reading assignment is:
Robert P. Charrow & Veda R. Charrow, Making Legal Language Understandable: A Psycholinguistic Study of Jury Instructions, 79 Colum. L. Rev. 1306, 1306-11, 1341-60 (1979) (read Introduction, Section I, Section IV, and Conclusion).