Author : Plain English Campaign
Publisher : Robson Books Limited
Page : 108 pages
File Size : 23,20 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Law
ISBN :
This book looks at the forces that have made traditional legal language what it is today and suggests some reasoms why the law needs plain English. It also shows why most of its peculiarities are unnecessary.
Author : J. Cotterill
Publisher : Springer
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 48,93 MB
Release : 2003-10-14
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0230006019
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.
Author : C. Heffer
Publisher : Springer
Page : 269 pages
File Size : 21,69 MB
Release : 2005-11-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0230502881
Drawing on representative corpora of transcripts from over 100 English criminal jury trials, this stimulating new book explores the nature of 'legal-lay discourse', or the language used by legal professionals before lay juries. Careful analyses of genres such as witness examination and the judge's summing-up reveal a strategic tension between a desire to persuade the jury and the need to conform to legal constraints. The book also suggests ways of managing this tension linguistically to help, not hinder, the jury.
Author : Gail Stygall
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 33,44 MB
Release : 1994-11-10
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9027282846
This study of Anglo-American legal discourse is the first comprehensive discourse analysis of American legal language in its prototypical setting, the trial by jury. With ethnographic data gathered in a civil jury trial, the book compares the discourse processing of the legal participants and the lay jurors in the trial.This study, examining an entire trial, finds that it is constraints at the level of a Foucauldian discursive formation that prevent lay understanding. Those constraints include the allocation of narrative speaking roles primarily to legal speakers in genres in which no sworn evidence is given, the suppression of narrative in ordinary witnesses, a set of restraints on witnesses' use of certain categories of evidentials, the legal topic originating in textual authority unknown to the lay participants, specific distribution of verb forms by legal genre, and a linguistic “burden” accompanying the legal “burden of proof” in the requirement that the lawyer of the moving party also use and explain technical legal terms to the jury at the same time as he or she presents evidence. All of these factors contribute to the incomprehensibility of legal discourse to lay auditors, resulting in the jury making their decision based on a commonsense script of the events precipitating the trial.The study concludes by arguing for a Foucauldian discourse analysis of institutional languages, a social theory powerful enough to account for the power and tenacity of these languages, where traditional linguistic explanation has failed.
Author : John R. Rickford
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 389 pages
File Size : 16,7 MB
Release : 2019-01-24
Category : Foreign Language Study
ISBN : 1107086132
Demonstrates how data, methods and theories from sociolinguistics and creole studies synergize and mutually benefit each subfield.
Author : Richard A. Parker
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 27,25 MB
Release : 2003-07-21
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 081735025X
Describes landmark free speech decisions of the Supreme Court while highlighting the issues of language, rhetoric, and communication that underlie them. At the intersection of communication and First Amendment law reside two significant questions: What is the speech we ought to protect, and why should we protect it? The 20 scholars of legal communication whose essays are gathered in this volume propose various answers to these questions, but their essays share an abiding concern with a constitutional guarantee of free speech and its symbiotic relationship with communication practices. Free Speech on Trial fills a gap between textbooks that summarize First Amendment law and books that analyze case law and legal theory. These essays explore questions regarding the significance of unregulated speech in a marketplace of goods and ideas, the limits of offensive language and obscenity as expression, the power of symbols, and consequences of restraint prior to publication versus the subsequent punishment of sources. As one example, Craig Smith cites Buckley vs. Valeo to examine how the context of corruption in the 1974 elections shaped the Court's view of the constitutionality of campaign contributions and expenditures. Collectively, the essays in this volume suggest that the life of free speech law is communication. The contributors reveal how the Court's free speech opinions constitute discursive performances that fashion, deconstruct, and reformulate the contours and parameters of the Constitution’s guarantee of free expression and that, ultimately, reconstitute our government, our culture, and our society.
Author : Susan Berk-Seligson
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 29,12 MB
Release : 2017-05-23
Category : Law
ISBN : 022632947X
“An essential text” that examines how interpreters can influence a courtroom, updated and expanded to cover contemporary issues in our diversifying society (Criminal Justice). Susan Berk-Seligson’s groundbreaking book presents a systematic study of court interpreters that raises some alarming and vitally important concerns. Contrary to the assumption that interpreters do not affect the dynamics of court proceedings, Berk-Seligson shows that interpreters could potentially make the difference between a defendant being found guilty or not guilty. The Bilingual Courtroom draws on more than one hundred hours of audio recordings of Spanish/English court proceedings in federal, state, and municipal courts, along with a number of psycholinguistic experiments involving mock juror reactions to interpreted testimony. This second edition includes an updated review of relevant research and provides new insights into interpreting in quasi-judicial, informal, and specialized judicial settings, such as small claims court, jails, and prisons. It also explores remote interpreting (for example, by telephone), interpreter training and certification, international trials and tribunals, and other cross-cultural issues. With a new preface by Berk-Seligson, this second edition not only highlights the impact of the previous versions of The Bilingual Courtroom, but also draws attention to the continued need for critical study of interpreting in our ever diversifying society.
Author : Gregory M. Matoesian
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 39,14 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Conduct of court proceedings
ISBN : 0195123301
Matoesian uses the notorious 1991 rape trial of William Kennedy Smith to provide an indepth analysis of language use and its role in that trial and the law more generally.
Author : Francesca Gaiba
Publisher : University of Ottawa Press
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 44,11 MB
Release : 1998
Category : History
ISBN : 0776604570
This book offers the first complete analysis of the emergence of simultaneous interpretation a the Nuremburg Trail and the individuals who made the process possible. Francesca Gaiba offers new insight into this monumental event based on extensive archival research and interviews with interpreters, who worked at the trial. This work provides an overview of the specific linguistic needs of the trial, and examines the recruiting of interpreters and the technical support available to them.
Author : John M. Conley
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 31,78 MB
Release : 2019-05-10
Category : Law
ISBN : 022648453X
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.
