Negative Acts in the Courtroom: Characteristics, Distribution, and Frequency among a National Cohort of Danish Prosecutors

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is an interesting paper, and novel in the way you have used the two theoretical constructs of SOS Theory and Incivility. In reading the paper, several times I thought of how those would work across other professional domains.

I have added comments on several pages of the draft - these relate to small gaps in information or clarity.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

I believe the article could be significantly improved by some diligent word-smithing. I found the English language a little clumsy in many places. In only a small number of cases was it the use of words I might not have chosen, rather my comments relate to sentence structure.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Page 1

Line 21 - no apostrophe needed after colleagues (not possessive)

Line 25 - from a career perspective? - not sure what ''in a career perspective'' means

Line 33 - suggest full stop after legal system and delete ''as''

Line 35 - add 'the' before conviction

Line 37 - full stop after 'individuals'- delete ''and

Lines 38-39 - delete ''according to the section in the....'' and replace with ''under the Danish Administration of Justice Act (1922) (the Administration of Justice Act).

Lines 40-41 - rewrite - 'According to the EU Justice Score Board (Euro-41 pean Commission, Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers, 2022), Denmark took 1st place [among who else]? in number of incoming court-cases 40 per 100 inhabitants in the years 2012-2020.'

Page 2

Line 46 replace 'hosting' with 'promoting' or 'fostering''

Line 47 - ''government-funded judges and prosecutors''

Line 48 - replaced 'fully processed and heard'' with 'heard'' or 'determined''

Line 51 - replace 'such as' with ''íncluding' - because you have already used 'such as' in this sentence.

Line 55 - add hyphen or space between 'post' and 'traumatic''

Line 59 - delete ''In''

Line 60 - 'reported''

Line 65 - correlated and correlations

Liné 66 - ''suggests'?

Line 80 - suggests?'

Page 3

Line 114 - 'do not examine

Line 118 - 'its'' impact not 'their impact

Line 120 - were you only looking at physically in the court room and not outside it - to the profession more broadly

Line 138 - whereby? - can you clarify the meaning of the rest of the sentence after wherefore?

Lines 139-140 - 'function and should be performed by another type of worker.''

Line 146 - are you able to give an example of each type of illegitimacy? For example, and illegitimate task might be asking a prosecutor to make coffee for the boss or to clean the workplace kitchen?

Line 147 - consists

Line 161 - courtroom management style/approach?

Line 162 - parties present?

Line 164 - ''as engaging in differential treatment between defence counsel and prosecutors

Line 166 - delete - before stressors

Line 176 - Cortina et al?

Line 179 - Cortina et al?

Line 181 -  ''Using an iterative coding process, the authors identified 11 types of adverse behaviours from the replies of 483 attorneys to open-ended questions. These questions focused on the attorneys' personal experiences of interpersonal mistreatment within the past 5 years of their career which made the greatest impression upon them.''

Line 186 - Cortina et al?

Line 187 - general incivility  (or disrespect/dishonesty ,...... threats/intimidation), was the most frequent form of incivility. This was followed by gender....including unprofessional forms of address....

Page 5

Line 205 - types of negative acts

Line 218 - ''in the period 10 August 2021 to 12 October 2021''. New sentence ''All prosecutors employed...

Line 223 - Conference for Prosecutors

Line 223 - on 23 September 2021

Page 12

Line 447 - try and break this paragraph up into several paragraphs to improve readability

Page 13

Line 497 - stressors

Line 498 - 'Given the relatively low government expenditure on courts of law in Denmark....

Line 500 - you are linking the low government spend to judge work overload because they are employed by the Danish government - is this a valid link?

Line 502 - may compromise

Line 503 - A 2020 report by...on judges' working conditions suggests the core judicial task of court management is hindered by....

Line 530 - prosecutors' court proceedings - do you mean behaviour?

Line 559 - wouldn't the judge in the courtroom already have the ultimate power to intervene?

Line 560 - more actively manage the court

Line 562 - Ensuring judge training in court, conflict, and process management may decrease the number of negative acts....

Page 15 - from line 568 - consider breaking this paragraph into smaller chunks to improve readability

Page 16 

Line 625 - Based on a combination of SOS-theory (who and date) and the construct of incivility developed by Cortina et al (2002) ..

Line 627 - remove hyphens from before stressors and behaviour

I have included my comments/suggestions in the response to the authors

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx