The Journey to Comprehensibility: Court Forms as the First Barrier to Accessing Justice
Grieshofer, Tatiana and Gee, Matt and Morton, Ralph (2021) The Journey to Comprehensibility: Court Forms as the First Barrier to Accessing Justice. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique. ISSN 0952-8059
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Abstract
The article explores the comprehensibility of court forms by providing a quantitative overview and a qualitative analysis of such syntactic characteristics as length and structure of sentences and noun phrases. The analysis is viewed in the broader context of genre characteristics of court forms, their role within legal proceedings, and their function for eliciting narratives from court users. The findings show that while the elicitation strategies are not always coherently aligned with the guidance sections, the guidance itself condenses legal and procedural information into overly complex and verbose syntactic constructions. Comprehensibility barriers are thus created through breaks in information flow, ambiguous syntactic constructions, missing information and misalignment between questions and guidance. Such comprehension challenges have a negative impact on the potential of court users to effectively engage with legal proceedings.
| Item Type: | Article | ||||||
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| Identification Number: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-021-09870-6 | ||||||
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| Uncontrolled Keywords: | court forms, comprehension, written legal discourse, litigants in person, procedural justice, noun phrases | ||||||
| Subjects: | CAH16 - law > CAH16-01 - law > CAH16-01-01 - law CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-07 - linguistics |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts, Design and Media > Birmingham Institute of Media and English > School of English | ||||||
| Depositing User: | Tatiana Tkacukova | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 22 Nov 2021 11:55 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 22 Nov 2021 15:59 | ||||||
| URI: | https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/12442 |
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