Cognitive communication and the law: a model for systemic risks and systemic interventions

Legal contexts frequently impose steep communication barriers, but because the law’s ontological framework of communication views it as an atomized, transaction phenomenon, the law lacks the ability to conceptualize and describe the way in which it itself imposes systemic communication burden. To overcome this shortcoming, this article presents a model for a systemic analysis of communication within the law. Part One operationalizes a set of cognitive-communication resources necessary to navigate communication in legal contexts. Part Two uses the operational model to illustrate how systemic elements of the law pressure the cognitive resources that underlie communication. Finally, Part Three uses the model to predict how possible systemic interventions might improve communication outcomes by alleviating or reducing systemic communication burdens. Not only does this article provide a conceptual tool to articulate the law’s systemic impacts on communication, the subsequent analysis offers a framework for exploring interventions that could ultimately lead to better outcomes for persons, particularly vulnerable or at-risk persons, who must navigate legal contexts. By changing how it conceptualizes communication and working to modify the communication dynamics that it itself perpetuates, the law can reduce the weight of the communication burdens that it imposes on the people within it.