The legalization of truth in international fact finding

Do legal judgments influence people’s attitudes and beliefs concerning contested events? This Article builds on studies from three disciplines—law, psychology, and political science—and employs experimental methods to shed light on the impact of legal institutions on their intended audiences. The Article identifies a rising “legalization of truth” phenomenon—the adoption of legal discourse to construct and interpret facts outside the courthouse. It argues that legal truth, while providing a framework of legal terminology and conventions to analyze and understand facts, comes with a price tag: it triggers cognitive and emotional biases that frustrate efforts to disseminate controversial information and to resolve factual disputes; and it lacks the emotional appeal, participatory value, and social cues that moral expressions or other types of social truth-telling entail. To demonstrate the legalization of truth process and to measure its impact on attitudes and beliefs, this Article focuses on the practice of international fact-finding. In recent years, international fact-finding has become a dominant response to armed conflicts and political violence around the world. Lacking compulsory jurisdiction, international fact-finding bodies have adopted legal discourse, assuming that legal reports uniformly inform the relevant publics with an authoritative account of what happened and motivate domestic sanctioning of in-group offenders.