Sociolinguistics and the Legal Process

Author: Diana Eades
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
ISBN: 1847696775
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
Sociolinguistics and the Legal Process is an introduction to language, law and society for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students. Its central focus is the exploration of what sociolinguistic research can tell us about how language works and doesn’t work in the legal process. Written for readers who may not have prior knowledge of sociolinguistics or the law, the book has an accessible style combined with discussion questions and exercises as well as topics for assignments, term papers, theses and dissertations. A wide range of legal contexts are investigated, including courtroom hearings, police interviews, lawyer interviews as well as small claims courts, mediation, youth justice conferencing and indigenous courts. The final chapter looks at how sociolinguists can contribute to the legal process: as expert witnesses, through legal education, and through investigating the role of language in the perpetuation of inequality in and through the legal process.

Language in the Legal Process

Author: J. Cotterill
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230522777
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
Linguists and lawyers from a range of countries and legal systems explore the language of the law and its participants, beginning with the role of the forensic linguist in legal proceedings, either as expert witness or in legal language reform. Subsequent chapters analyze different aspects of language and interaction in the chain of events from a police emergency call through the police interview context and into the courtroom, as well as appeal court and alternative routes to justice. A broad-based, coherent introduction to the discourse of language and law.

Language and the Law

Author: Sanford Schane
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441114629
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
This comprehensive introduction to Language and the Law looks at the common areas of interaction between linguistics and the legal process. Each chapter presents a language issue or problem relevant to the law. This is then examined using excerpts from cases where judges in their decisions have had to confront that particular issue. Professor Schane considers each issue both from the legal point of view and from a linguistic point of view, to show how each are relevant to each other. Issues covered include: * Ambiguity * Vagueness * Metaphor * Legal fiction * Presuppositions * Leading questions * Legal hearsay The book requires no previous legal or linguistic background, and all concepts and notions from the two fields are explained in a non-technical manner. This fascinating introduction to Language and the Law will be of interest to students and academics encountering this area for the first time. Student friendly features include: exercises, suggestions for further reading, glossary and excerpts from relevant cases.

Legal-Lay Communication

Author: Chris Heffer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199746834
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Book Description
Provides an engaging and thought-provoking exploration of the way texts emerging in the legal process 'travel' in various ways to produce new forms and new meanings in new contexts.

The Language of Judges

Author: Lawrence M. Solan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226767892
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
Since many legal disputes are battles over the meaning of a statute, contract, testimony, or the Constitution, judges must interpret language in order to decide why one proposed meaning overrides another. And in making their decisions about meaning appear authoritative and fair, judges often write about the nature of linguistic interpretation. In the first book to examine the linguistic analysis of law, Lawrence M. Solan shows that judges sometimes inaccurately portray the way we use language, creating inconsistencies in their decisions and threatening the fairness of the judicial system. Solan uses a wealth of examples to illustrate the way linguistics enters the process of judicial decision making: a death penalty case that the Supreme Court decided by analyzing the use of adjectives in a jury instruction; criminal cases whose outcomes depend on the Supreme Court's analysis of the relationship between adverbs and prepositional phrases; and cases focused on the meaning of certain words in the Constitution. Solan finds that judges often describe our use of language poorly because there is no clear relationship between the principles of linguistics and the jurisprudential goals that the judge wishes to promote. A major contribution to the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on law and its social and cultural context, Solan's lucid, engaging book is equally accessible to linguists, lawyers, philosophers, anthropologists, literary theorists, and political scientists.

Law, Language and the Courtroom

Author: Stanislaw Gozdz Roszkowski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100048386X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Book Description
This book explores the language of judges. It is concerned with understanding how language works in judicial contexts. Using a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, it looks in detail at the ways in which judicial discourse is argued, constructed, interpreted and perceived. Focusing on four central themes - constructing judicial discourse and judicial identities, judicial argumentation and evaluative language, judicial interpretation, and clarity in judicial discourse - the book’s ultimate goal is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of current critical issues of the role of language in judicial settings. Contributors include legal linguists, lawyers, legal scholars, legal practitioners, legal translators and anthropologists, who explore patterns of linguistic organisation and use in judicial institutions and analyse language as an instrument for understanding both the judicial decision-making process and its outcome. The book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in legal linguistics and those specialising in judicial argumentation and reasoning ,and forensic linguists interested in the use of language in judicial settings.

Just Words

Author: John M. Conley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022648453X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
Is it “just words” when a lawyer cross-examines a rape victim in the hopes of getting her to admit an interest in her attacker? Is it “just words” when the Supreme Court hands down a decision or when business people draw up a contract? In tackling the question of how an abstract entity exerts concrete power, Just Words focuses on what has become the central issue in law and language research: what language reveals about the nature of legal power. John M. Conley, William M. O'Barr, and Robin Conley Riner show how the microdynamics of the legal process and the largest questions of justice can be fruitfully explored through the field of linguistics. Each chapter covers a language-based approach to a different area of the law, from the cross-examinations of victims and witnesses to the inequities of divorce mediation. Combining analysis of common legal events with a broad range of scholarship on language and law, Just Words seeks the reality of power in the everyday practice and application of the law. As the only study of its type, the book is the definitive treatment of the topic and will be welcomed by students and specialists alike. This third edition brings this essential text up to date with new chapters on nonverbal, or “multimodal,” communication in legal settings and law, language, and race.

Language and Power in Court

Author: J. Cotterill
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230006019
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Book Description
Sociolinguists and lawyers will find insight and relevance in this account of the language of the courtroom, as exemplified in the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson. The trial is examined as the site of linguistic power and persuasion, focusing on the role of language in (re)presenting and (re)constructing the crime. In addition to the trial transcripts, the book draws on Simpson's post-arrest interview, media reports and post-trial interviews with jurors. The result is a unique multi-dimensional insight into the 'Trial of the Century' from a linguistic and discursive perspective.

Language in the Judicial Process

Author: Judith N. Levi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1489937196
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Book Description
Legal realism is a powerful jurisprudential tradition which urges attention to sodal conditions and predicts their influence in the legal process. The rela tively recent "sodal sdence in the law" phenomenon, in which sodal research is increasingly relied on to dedde court cases is a direct result of realistic jurisprudence, which accords much significance in law to empirical reports about sodal behavior. The empirical research used by courts has not, how ever, commonly dealt with language as an influential variable. This volume of essays, coedited by Judith N. Levi and Anne Graffam Walker, will likely change that situation. Language in the Judicial Process is a superb collection of original work which fits weIl into the realist tradition, and by focusing on language as a key variable, it establishes a new and provocative perspective on the legal process. The perspective it offers, and the data it presents, make this volume a valuable source of information both for judges and lawyers, who may be chiefly concemed with practice, and for legal scholars and sodal sdentists who do basic research about law.

Language and the Law

Author: Monwabisi K. Ralarala
Publisher: African Sun Media
ISBN: 1991201834
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 458

Book Description
Language and the Law: Global Perspectives in Forensic Linguistics from Africa and beyond is the third volume in a series of books designed to contribute and respond to growing interest in forensic linguistics or language and the law on the African continent. Drawing mostly on contexts where traditional African laws and Western laws are practised side-by-side, and where there are discontinuities between local knowledge systems, belief systems and language practices on the one hand, and official languages of law discourse, conceptualisation and jurisprudence documentation on the other, the chapters in this volume problematise, among other issues, the mediation practices (or lack thereof) of language and legal processes, discourse strategies and complexities in (mis)interpretations in second language court contexts and the miscarriage of justice that these may entail.