Words Matter. Perhaps Especially Ours as Lawyers.

• Publication year: 2020
• Citation: Vol. 33 No. 3
• Author: By Rupa G. Singh

Words Matter. Perhaps Especially Ours as Lawyers.

By Rupa G. Singh

Rupa G. Singh is a certified appellate specialist who handles complex civil appeals and critical motions in state and federal court at Niddrie Addams Fuller Singh LLP, San Diego's only appellate boutique. She is founding president of the San Diego Appellate Inn of Court, former chair of the San Diego County Bar's Appellate Practice Section, and a self-proclaimed word enthusiast.

Words matter, and the right words matter most of all. In the end, they're all that remain of us. — John Birmingham

My grandfather was a well-respected, reasonably successful lawyer in post-colonial India. Lawyers also seem disproportionately likely to lead nation-states, movements, and revolutions, and to transition seamlessly into politics and government. But I didn't become a lawyer to pay homage to family tradition. Nor did I aspire to lead a movement or rise through the ranks in the public sector.

Rather, I gravitated towards the law because of how it quietly empowers words over weapons. Whether it's determining who owns a parcel of land, what criminal act warrants life in prison, or how to award custody of children after a contentious divorce, the law represents our agreement to forsake fists, swords, and guns in favor of words to resolve the most intractable of human disputes.

Recently, though, I have been forced to think more deeply about the power of our pen as lawyers. In her thought-provoking presentation, Professor Leslie P. Culver used anthropological, legal, and academic research to explain persuasively that our implicit biases affect the words we choose in our legal advocacy, allowing us to either unconsciously reinforce or consciously exploit prevalent stereotypes. (Leslie P. Culver, White Doors, Black Footsteps: Implicit Bias & Cultural Consciousness in Legal Writing, SDCBA App. Prac. Sec. Presentation (June 24, 2020); see also < www.law.uci.edu/faculty/visiting/culver/ >.)

Wait, what? The implicit biases that decades of research shows we all harbor are somehow reflected in our oral and written advocacy on behalf of clients? Yes, and let me count the ways. Confirmation bias causes us to pay more attention to information that confirms our existing belief system and to disregard information that is contradictory, for example, discounting the possibility of women perpetrating sexual harassment. (Kathleen Nalty, Strategies for Confronting Unconscious Bias (2017) The Fed. Law. 26, 28.) Attribution bias causes us to make more favorable assessments of behaviors by...