Definition
Persuading, in legal contexts, refers to the act of inducing, influencing, or causing another person to take or refrain from a particular action through communication, argument, or appeal — whether by lawful means or unlawful ones. The legal significance of the term turns almost entirely on context: persuading a jury through advocacy is the core function of trial practice, while persuading a witness to change testimony or withhold evidence is a criminal offense.
1. Lawful persuasion: The legitimate exercise of argument, evidence, and advocacy to influence a decision-maker — a court, jury, regulatory body, or contracting party.
2. Unlawful persuasion: Conduct directed at witnesses, jurors, or government officials with the intent to obstruct legal proceedings. Federal criminal statutes use "persuades" as a term of art to describe one mode of witness tampering and obstruction, alongside "induces," "threatens," and "corruptly persuades." The word "corruptly persuades" has generated substantial litigation over whether it requires consciousness of wrongdoing and whether it reaches only those who know their conduct is unlawful.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "An act of persuasion."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To influence or convince by argument, entreaty, or expostulation; to draw or incline to a determination by presenting sufficient motives.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant in one direction: ordinary persuasion is understood as legitimate and value-neutral — a standard feature of communication. In criminal law, "persuading" or "corruptly persuades" is a term triggering serious federal liability. Researchers reading a statute or indictment must not import the neutral common meaning. The word "corruptly" does significant work in limiting the criminal sense, but courts have split on precisely how much.
Common Confusion
Persuading is frequently conflated with threatening and inducing when these terms appear together in obstruction and witness-tampering statutes. They are listed in the alternative precisely because they occupy different points on a spectrum of influence: threatening implies coercion through fear; inducing suggests causation without specifying the mechanism; persuading implies rational or emotional appeal. The distinctions matter for charging and for sufficiency-of-evidence analysis. A defendant who offers a bribe does not merely "persuade" — but one who presents false information to a witness to cause the witness to recant may persuade without threatening or offering anything of value.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in criminal law must pay close attention to whether a source uses "persuading" in its generic advocacy sense or as a statutory term of art. In federal obstruction and witness-tampering law, the phrase "corruptly persuades" has been the subject of significant circuit-level disagreement, particularly following the Supreme Court's treatment of corrupt intent in obstruction contexts. Sources predating the modern federal obstruction statutes will use the word descriptively and will not flag this technical dimension.
In civil litigation research, persuading surfaces in the law of evidence and burdens — "burden of persuasion" is the more precise label for what is often called the burden of proof. Conflating the burden of production with the burden of persuasion is a common research error; older sources may not distinguish them clearly or may use terminology inconsistently.
Historical treatises on advocacy and evidence use persuasion as a rhetorical and logical concept rather than a legal element, so researchers moving from those sources into statutory analysis must shift frameworks entirely.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence does not carry a standalone entry for "persuading." The source material surfaced under this search is a fragment of the PERSONAL PROPERTY entry — an unrelated artifact of indexing proximity. This is not an unusual gap: Rapalje & Lawrence, like most nineteenth-century law dictionaries, treated persuasion as a function of advocacy and evidence doctrine rather than as an independent legal term requiring definition. The criminal-law dimension of the word as a statutory element is largely a twentieth-century development driven by the expansion of federal obstruction statutes.
Researchers should not read significance into this absence. It reflects the historical moment of the dictionary, not any settled conclusion that the term lacked legal content.
Jurisdictional Note
The "corruptly persuades" formulation is most consequential in federal criminal practice under 18 U.S.C. § 1512 and related provisions. State witness-tampering and obstruction statutes vary considerably in whether they use "persuades" as a distinct element or fold the concept into broader "inducement" or "influence" language. Researchers working in state courts should consult the specific statutory text rather than assuming federal doctrine controls.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Obstruction of Justice; Witness Tampering; Burden of Proof (for persuasion in the evidentiary sense).