Instructions to jurors

Abstract

Even though the institution of the common law jury can be traced back historically to the 13th century, for hundreds of years judges left it up to jurors to determine the rules or principles of law that they would use to decide a case. It is only relatively recently that judges have begun to instruct or direct jurors on the law. Formulating jury instructions from scratch was a great deal of work, however, so in the 1930s and 1940s some California judges began to create and publish standardized (fill-in-the-blank) instructions, starting a movement that spread throughout most of the United States. While these standardized instructions were almost always legally accurate, they were often not very comprehensible. As a result, several states have begun to make serious efforts to draft more comprehensible instructions. By far the most ambitious undertaking took place in California. This article describes the process and the results of California’s efforts to create jury instructions in more ordinary language.