The language used by witnesses and litigants can powerfully influence evaluations by legal decision makers of disputant credibility and blame. Previous experimental research has addressed this claim in many studies of undergraduates and law students. It is not known whether this generalization applies to sitting judges or whether it extends to other institutional contexts in which dispute settlement occurs, such as mediation centers. In this article we present findings from three experiments conducted with undergraduates, sitting judges, and practicing mediators. Speech style (powerful, powerless) and discourse (rule, relational) were manipulated in a 2×2 repeated measures design in each subject pool. The findings suggest that students' and judges' evaluations of disputant credibility, social characteristics, and blame are affected by speech style, while mediators' evaluations of the same are affected by particular interactions of speech style and discourse only. These findings are interpreted as a function of the prescriptive and behavioral language norms to which students, judges, and mediators are routinely exposed in their institutional contests. Implications for future law and language research are also discussed.

Twentieth-century reform of the American law of evidence was initially premised on the ideals of legal progressivism, ideals splintered by American legal realism. In preparing the American Law Institute's Model Code of Evidence from 1939 to 1942, Harvard Law School professor Edmund M. Morgan attempted to reconstitute the framework of reform in light of the challenge of legal realism. The Model Code was based on granting greater discretion to the trial judge and changing the goals of the trial from a search for truth to a “rational” resolution of disputes. In large part due to these apparently radical and “corrosive” changes, the Model Code failed to win professional support and was not adopted by any state. The structure of the Model Code was used for the two subsequent evidence codification efforts, the Uniform Rules of Evidence and the Federal Rules of Evidence. These codification efforts found greater academic favor in part because they fit within the post-World War II jurisprudence of reasoned elaboration. The Federal Rules also enjoyed extraordinary professional favor because the drafters explicitly affirmed truth as the goal of the rules. The irony is that the framework of the Federal Rules, since they are based on the Model Code, contradicts this message.