Legal Lay Communication

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.

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.

This volume provides descriptive and interpretive insights into the ‘living’ usage of language and other semiotic modes in building and performing the law across academic, professional and institutional contexts, where issues arise from the meaning and function of legal texts, discourse and genre in constituting and enabling conventions, albeit dynamically, and account for the socially and (inter)culturally influenced forms of discursive actions and practices. The twenty contributions included here weave significant contexts and situations for legal discourse and practice into a tight thread, and justify selected topic areas through a variety of approaches, frameworks, methodologies, and procedures. As such, this publication is multidimensional and multiperspectival in its design and implementation of key issues confronting discursive actions and practices of the law, and provides an invaluable resource for academics in a wider range of disciplines, including linguistics, applied linguistics and communication studies. It will also be of interest to students of interdisciplinary discourse analysis.

As a linguistically-grounded, critical examination of consent, this volume views consent not as an individual mental state or act but as a process that is interactionally-and discursively-situated. It highlights the ways in which legal consent is often fictional (at best) due to the impoverished view of meaning and the linguistic ideologies that typically inform interpretations and representations in the legal system. The authors are experts in linguistics and law, who use diverse theoretical and analytical approaches to examine the complex ways in which language is used to seek, negotiate, give, or withhold consent in a range of legal contexts. Authors draw on case studies, or larger research corpora or a wider sociolegal approach, in investigations of: police-citizen interactions in the street, police interviews with suspects, police call handlers, rape and abduction trials, interactions with lay litigants in a multilingual small claims court, a restorative justice sentencing scheme for young offenders, biomedical research, and legal disputes over contracts.

This book discusses the proper use of legal language in business communication. While communicating, a business leader has to bear in mind the relevant legal framework, and be sure to never violate it. However, legal language in itself can be so complex and difficult that it is often unclear as to what meaning can be ascribed to different words and phrases used in a particular context. Also, while it’s easy to say that there are certain limits to the law, those limits are not readily visible to the uninitiated; occasionally, even experts flounder. Exploring precisely these topics, the book will be of interest to students of business, law, and business communication; managers; lawyers; researchers; practitioners; and general readers alike.

Communication in Legal Advocacy integrates work in legal theory, communication theory, social science research, and strategic planning to provide a comprehensive anaysis of the communication processes in trials. Responding to the emerging interest in alternative dispute resolution, the book situates the trial within the broadercontext of dispute resolution, calling attention to the ways in which negotiation, mediation, and arbitration interrelate with trials. This study bends traditional argumentative analyses such as the rational-world notions of adversary proceedings, presumption, burden of proof, and essential issues with contemporary ideas of narrative rationality. The volume offers the reader a practical and strategic guide to effective trial advocacy, and it provides theoretical insights into trials as socially sanctioned mechanisms of dispute resolution.

This volume functions as a guide to the multidisciplinary nature of Forensic Linguistics understood in its broadest sense as the interface between language and the law. It seeks to address the links in this relatively young field between theory, method and data, without neglecting the need for new research questions in the field. Perhaps the most striking feature of this collection is its range, strikingly illustrating the multi-dimensionality of Forensic Linguistics. All of the contributions share a preoccupation with the painstaking linguistic work involved, using and interpreting data in a restrained and reasoned way.

Forensic linguistics, or the study of language and the law, is a growing field of scholarly and public interest with an established research presence. The Discourse of Police Interviews aims to further the discussion by analyzing how police interviews are constructed and used to investigate and prosecute crimes. The first book to focus exclusively on the discourses of police interviewing, The Discourse of Police Interviews examines leading debates, approaches, and topics in contemporary police interview research. Among other topics, the book explores the sociolegal, psychological, and discursive framework of popular police interview techniques employed in the United States and the United Kingdom, such as PEACE and Reid, and the discursive practices of institutional representatives like police officers and interpreters that can influence the construction and quality of linguistic evidence. Together, the contributions situate the police interview as part of a complex, and multistage, criminal justice process. The book will be of interest to both scholars and practitioners in a variety of fields, such as linguistic anthropology, interpreting studies, criminology, law, and sociology.