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Voice And Context In Simulated Everyday Legal Discourse: The Influence Of Sex Differences And Social Ties, Calvin Morrill, Tyler Harrison, Michelle Johnson

Calvin Morrill

Everyday legal discount 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 …