Jury duty: Competing legal ideologies and the interactional negotiation of authority in jury deliberation

According to Philips (1998), as a state-connected institution, criminal courts are a site of interactional construction of nation-states as a sociocultural phenomenon. Past analyses of the construction of institutional authority have focused on ways in which officials (re)enforce institutional practices. This study examines ways that lay participants negotiate, appropriate and challenge institutional authority and ideology. In an interactional sociolinguistic discourse analysis of a jury deliberation in a US criminal trial, I examine the interactional process and outcomes of the jury's decision-making.; I introduce the concept kinetic intertextuality to account for jurors' embodied orientation to, and appropriation of, the legalistic texts in their presence. I demonstrate that legalistic texts, such as jury instructions, become an organizing element of the interaction through the jurors' verbal and embodied intertextual links to them. Jurors actively incorporate these materials into their interaction as a means of appropriating legal authority, and backgrounding their agency in constructing a legal reality. The legalistic texts recontextualize (Bernstein 1990) a formalist legal ideology, rendering legal formalism the “reified and naturalized meaning” (Iedema and Wodak 1999: 13) of law.; I demonstrate, further, that framing plays a role in reifying legal formalism. I examine how jurors use framing to legitimate formalism, and de-legitimate an alternative legal ideology, legal realism. Jurors' contributions that adhere to a formalist ideology are ratified within the deliberation frame, while contributions that propound a realist ideology are rejected as out-of-frame activity. What counts as deliberating becomes part of an ideological struggle to determine the meaning of law.; The study makes new connections among literatures. In combining the insights from research on language, the body, and the material surround with research on intertextuality, I expand the notion of interactional appropriation of texts to include kinetic intertextuality. I bring frame analysis to bear on understanding the relationship between interaction and ideological struggle. I demonstrate that frames can be ideologically constituted, and frame shifts can be used to strategically legitimate one ideology over others. I conclude that legal formalism is imposed on the deliberation through jurors' active appropriation of the authority of the courts' texts, affecting how the law is constructed.