Interdisciplinary Approaches to ‘Law and Language’

With the emergence in recent decades of this relatively distinct field of ‘law and language’, there is now a specialized area of study concerned with the intersection between these two important domains. Before going on to engage with perspectives and findings in this newly established field, however, it is worth pointing out that, in broader terms, the field of enquiry is far less recent than such a description would suggest.

Many of the questions and unresolved problems of present investigations of language and law are posed in new forms and in contemporary terminology, but they draw significantly on approaches to issues developed in different terms and contexts throughout the history of a cluster of related disciplines: in political and moral philosophy; in nineteenth- and twentieth-century sociology; in literary criticism of successive periods; and in hermeneutics, rhetoric and anthropology – as well as in those publications generally described as jurisprudence. In the Introduction to a book which will take up many of these same topics, it is worth recalling at the outset some of the main features of that history.

For more than two millennia in Western traditions, and for a similar period in a number of other cultural traditions, language has been acknowledged as the essential medium, but also as a significant obstacle, in formulating general rules to govern social relationships and behaviour (for critical discussion, see Goodrich Reference Goodrich1986). How laws should be formulated was a topic, for example, among philosophers from Plato and Aristotle onwards, through St Augustine, Aquinas, Gratian, Herder, Savigny and Bentham, leading into modern jurisprudence (most notably the work of H. L. A. Hart).Footnote ² In a second major stream of discussion – now a distinct category but in classical and mediaeval scholarship part of a different overall configuration of disciplines (the classical quadrivium and trivium) – sustained discussion also took place of the aims, techniques and effects of legal rhetoric. That strand of thinking shows a similar and often interwoven lineage: from Isocrates in ancient Greece and the contrasting positions of Plato and Aristotle, through Cicero and other Roman orators on legal and political rhetoric into changing religious conceptions of how human language should be related to truth and belief in the Middle Ages. Rhetoric then flourished in increasingly secular forms in Early Modern European humanism (Vickers Reference Vickers.1989), until a period of critique and loss of influence set in during the seventeenth century, under pressure from simpler forms of expression deemed more suited to emergent scientific reasoning and experiment. Interest in rhetoric then revived once more, gaining ground in law in two modern directions: one shown by the stylistic achievements of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century courtroom advocacy, before a renewed period of reaction against legal oratory which continues; the other more concerned with forms of reasoning and evident in ‘legal realist’ arguments (i.e. arguments put forward most influentially by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. judges and legal philosophers, challenging whether legal judgments are or can be arrived at based solely on reasons articulated verbally, or whether unspoken moral, pragmatic and other considerations play an essential part). From this historical strand associated with rhetoric emerges a prominent theme in modern legal theory, especially in the United States: focus on ‘rhetoricity’ as a proxy for power in discourse, as for instance in the critical legal studies movement (e.g. Goodrich), in neo-pragmatism (e.g. Fish) and in forms of literary jurisprudence (e.g. White). In each of these approaches, scholars have drawn attention to law as a persuasive or rhetorical practice as much as a moral or formal system – either to celebrate that characteristic or remonstrate against it.

Building on these deep historical foundations, what is now typically thought of as ‘law and language’ scholarship reflects a number of important further inputs. The field was energized, for example, by developments in twentieth-century social scientific and humanities disciplines, including anthropology, sociology and especially linguistics. Contemporary work is accordingly best understood – perhaps because of the variety of influences on it – as a cluster of intersecting approaches rather than as a unified research programme.

Within the intersecting approaches, a number of contributory streams may be identified. Continuing with a primarily historical approach, for example, some scholars have traced the development of legal discourse within the more general emergence of literacy, first in handwritten forms (Danet and Bogoch Reference Danet and Bogoch1992; Clanchy Reference Clanchy1993), then later in print, describing a changing political economy of printing that over time created an established legal literature (Harvey Reference Harvey2015). Another strand, of philologically inspired research, describes and critiques the historical development and contemporary manifestations of the terminology and discourse styles used in law (Mellinkoff Reference Mellinkoff1963; Tiersma Reference Tiersma1999; Mattila Reference Mattila2016). Other scholars working in philosophy of language have pursued implications of the work of Wittgenstein, Grice, Searle and others in examining the philosophical foundations of language in law, exploring topics including vagueness, intentionalism and textualism in legal interpretation, as well as how far legislation should be understood as communication (Kurzon Reference Kurzon1986; Kevelson Reference Kevelson1988; Marmor and Soames Reference Marmor and Soames2011). Sociolegal scholars and linguistic anthropologists have conducted fieldwork examining uses of language and their associated ideologies, meanings and values, in sites including U.S. law schools (Mertz Reference Mertz2007), tribal courts (Richland Reference Richland2008) and American small claims courts (Conley and O'Barr Reference Conley and O'Barr1990). The more visible emergence of a ‘forensic linguistic’ branch of the field is often said to have begun with applied linguistic work by Enkvist in the early 1960s, but then grew in ways particularly inspired by courtroom evidence given by Coulthard and French in the United Kingdom and by Shuy, Butters and other researchers in the United States. This forensic linguistic approach – now perhaps the most widely known version of ‘law and language’ – frequently analyses linguistic data relevant to legal investigations or litigation (e.g. utterances, wiretaps, e-mails) in ways that can result in submission of expert evidence where deemed admissible at trial. Other linguists have drawn on contrastive linguistics and translation theory in examining the practice of interpreting and the wider bilingual and multilingual legal contexts in which it takes place (Berk-Seligson Reference Berk-Seligson2002; Šarčević 1997). Similarly concerned with questions of language policy, especially where those questions engage ‘access to justice’ issues, other linguists (e.g. Eades Reference Eades2010) have sought to mitigate linguistic barriers created in legal proceedings by distinctive styles of language use, often among regional or ethnic groups including indigenous populations. Other researchers again compare approaches to meaning in legal interpretation with sometimes rather different understandings of how language works that have developed in linguistics and related fields (Hutton Reference Hutton2009).

Across this range of approaches, ‘law and language’ has become a notable recent entrant among what are sometimes called ‘law and’ subjects (law and literature, law and society, law and economics, etc.). But whether referred to as ‘law and language’, ‘forensic linguistics’, ‘legal linguistics’ or by some other name – and whether applying linguistic expertise or probing long-recognised jurisprudential problems from new angles – today the field is well established. It can boast two international professional associations: the International Association of Forensic Linguists (IAFL) and the International Language and Law Association (ILLA). It has no fewer than seven international journals dedicated to its various strands of research (notably the International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law and the recently launched biannual journal Language and Law). The field has been shaped by pioneering monographs (Mellinkoff Reference Mellinkoff1963; Goodrich Reference Goodrich1987; Bix Reference Bix1993; Solan Reference Solan1993, Reference Solan2010; Tiersma Reference Tiersma1999; Schane Reference Schane2006; Hutton Reference Hutton2009, Reference Hutton2014; Mattila Reference Mattila2016; Berman Reference Berman2013; Marmor Reference Marmor2014), and publishers have brought work together in a number of handbooks and edited collections, including some prompted by conferences or other events (Schauer Reference Schauer1993; Gibbons Reference Gibbons2003; Coulthard and Johnson Reference Coulthard and Johnson2007; Gibbons and Turrell Reference Gibbons and Turrell2008; Freeman and Smith Reference Freeman and Smith2011; Solan and Tiersma Reference Solan and Tiersma2012; Solan, Ainsworth and Shuy Reference Solan, Ainsworth and Shuy2015; Visconti Reference Visconti2018). There is also at least one practical student textbook which introduces topics across the subject area range described earlier (Durant and Leung Reference Durant and Leung2016).

This Volume

This collection of essays addresses many of the intersections between law and language previously described. Building on an international roundtable held at the Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard University in 2014, after which further discussion and critical exchanges took place, the book brings together writing by scholars working in several different disciplines including law, linguistics and anthropology. Many of the contributors are international leaders in the field of ‘law and language’; some are emergent scholars (though in several cases prominent in related fields). All share a concern with fostering dialogue in what Tiersma (Reference Tiersma, Olsen, Lorz and Stein2009: 11) called, in a cautious formulation based on observations we have made earlier about the subject's formation, a ‘relatively fractured’ field.

The roundtable which inspired the book was organised around a theme to which speakers directed their thoughts based on their respective expertise and interests: ‘Law as living language’, a theme evoking the symbolic interface provided for law by verbal discourse that Berman, from whom the phrase was taken, also liked to call ‘communification’ (Berman Reference Berman2013). That theme, taken forward in contributions to this book, explores law and language as each a fundamental attribute of the human condition which serves to articulate profound and general human needs or tendencies – in this way a theme inviting consideration of deep-seated questions that are easily overtaken by abstractions of legal theory or the specifics of legislation and case law. Contributions to the volume point to a sense, cutting across particular case studies they examine, that many features and problems of language in law can only be understood as disconnects, mismatches, or awkward silences – as failures of clarity or certainty which are somehow resolved by their idealisation as special characteristics of legal discourse. Prominent in such lines of thinking is concern with tacit assumptions behind many aspects of verbal expression in law, including how words create – through their presuppositions and implications – a kind of ‘unspoken language of the law’.

We should comment on the word ‘meaning’ in the book's title. Understood in broad terms and at different levels, the term ‘meaning’ signals the concern described earlier with what may be inferred (or fail to be inferred) from legal discourse, especially among mixed professional and lay audiences. The book contains discussion of the semantics of particular words (e.g. in statutory interpretation; as regards law's doctrine of ‘plain meaning’; or in seeking to define what law is). Some chapters examine complications presented by utterance meaning (e.g. in courtroom questioning and interpreting, where difficulties of testimony and evidence are inevitably entwined with problems of word meaning). Other chapters extend discussion to the wider significance attributed to stretches of verbal discourse (e.g. in the politics of hate speech). Across and between what might be thought of as these different levels of language or analysis of language, emphasis on meaning in most chapters is concerned with how norms are articulated (and implicit relations of power created) in ways that include not only verbal choices, ambiguity, and other audible or visible evidence of linguistic signs but also through omission and silence.

A second key concept throughout the volume is power. In conjunction with the book's exploration of meaning, we seek to shed light on how power relations expressed in language play a part in law's exercise of legitimate (as well as sometimes illegitimate) authority. By including the word ‘power’ in the book's title, we draw attention to a cluster of issues which confront the field under discussion but which are rarely addressed directly. Thirty years ago, not drawing attention to the issue of power in ‘law and language’ studies might have appeared unsurprising; but such an omission now – though still common – would call for comment. For example, while discussion of the concept of power may be more central in social theory than in law or linguistics, even in a ‘social theory’ context such discussion overlaps with legal topics wherever law is viewed as being one among various social institutions rather than as an abstract system of rules. Further, over the last thirty years or so power has become a more important topic in linguistics, as well as in anthropology; and power is also an important theme in legal theory, ranging across topics such as sovereignty, command and recognition understandings of legal obedience, and coercion. It is to be expected therefore that questions to do with power will surface in interdisciplinary discussion of law and language, even if the frameworks of reference available for addressing such questions depend substantially on researchers’ particular background disciplines.

As a way into the approaches to power that contributors to this volume may be making reference to, in what follows we outline briefly some of the main considerations that need to be taken into account.

The history of the concept of power is most easily traceable in overlapping but sometimes contrasting political and philosophical positions on topics including government, social order, class and inequality. Major thinkers on these matters include Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Weber and Marx, as well as twentieth-century writers such as Habermas, Gramsci, Foucault and Hayek (for critical discussion, see Hindess Reference Hindess1996, whom we follow in our outline later here but who would also include Lukes among such thinkers). In the resulting multidimensional debate about what ‘power’ is, a number of major issues surface when writers about law and language invoke concepts of power in explaining the significance of their research.

Commonly in the social sciences, as well as in everyday conversation, the word power is used to signal ability to directly control (coerce) people's behaviour. Such power may be viewed as unjust or even as evil; or alternatively it may be viewed as necessary in given circumstances, as in Hobbes. But exercise of power in this sense is assumed to be endemic to humans as social beings. Traced in particular situations, power of this kind can appear as a quantitative phenomenon: a variable amount of generalised capacity to act successfully in imposing a specific will on others. But imposition of power by force or threat of force of this kind is often contrasted with another conception: power as a kind of authority. This contrasting notion is commonly invoked where the sorts of power in question are perceived as legitimate in relation to an established social structure, or exercised in a ‘soft’ form (e.g. by influence including after consultation or encouragement by incentives). In such contexts, what we understand as power serves to make social actions possible, as much as constraining or preventing them. This second conception then becomes more complicated by its frequent combination of capacity to act with some kind of claimed legitimation in the form of a right, entitlement or even responsibility to act – with these characteristics resting ultimately on the consent of those over whom power is exercised and to whom power may be held accountable.

These widely recognised contrasts show power to be an ambivalent concept. Beyond such foundational distinctions, too, power also needs to be assessed in other respects. Some conceptions of political power, for example, are monolithic; they presume ultimate control over resources of all kinds (whether such power is concentrated in one person, such as a sovereign or tyrant, or is embodied in state institutions and other bodies). Other conceptions, in contrast, conceive power as something dispersed in a pluralistic way across many civil society organisations, divided up in localised pockets of delegated and legitimised power – ‘powers’ – exercised by bodies as their respective ‘jurisdictions’ (for wider discussion, see Edwards Reference Edwards2004). In such pluralistic social structures, interpretation of the overall nature and effects of power has to proceed differently. A given power regime might illustrate, for instance, a highly structured Gramscian pattern of hegemony: there is an alignment of more than one social group rather than a unified social elite, and it is those groups functioning together which secures a political settlement. Alternatively, the same regime might (following Foucault) be thought more difficult to analyse: its power structure could appear not to be easily compartmentalized but instead diffused across a very large number of social factions and actors, all of them disenfranchised and unwitting to some extent.

As might be expected, much of the difficulty in such ‘social theory’ debates is echoed in appeals made to notions of power in linguistics and textual analysis. The basic idea that language expresses ‘power’ is itself rarely doubted, because language is one of or perhaps the major symbolic means of encoding and mediating social relationships. But exactly what is meant by power beyond this general proposition is harder to say, and seems likely to vary between different linguistic settings including whole linguistic cultures. Bourdieu, among others, has emphasized how, as speakers of a language, we tend to be aware of many ways in which linguistic exchanges reflect different positions in a social hierarchy and so can express relations of domination, subordination and exclusion. Some of the mechanisms for doing this are obvious (e.g. variation in accent, intonation, vocabulary differences and honorifics); others are less clear, such as varying forms of command and different kinds of rhetoric, varying between vernacular, professional/educated and traditional elite forms. Other linguistic mechanisms again express authority or control by means of general verbal behaviour (including selective allusiveness, domination of conversational turn-taking, or use of language to intimidate or show condescension or contempt).

Despite the pervasiveness of power relations, it is only relatively recently that power has emerged as an explicit research theme in linguistics. It did so perhaps particularly in opposition to myths of the social homogeneity of language-using communities and the assumed detachment of language as a system (e.g. in concepts such as Saussure's langue or Chomsky's competence) from fields of social relations in which language use is embedded (for discussion, see Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Thompson1977). Earlier, the value-neutral description of contemporary language systems as pioneered by Saussure had itself been a major intellectual shift and a defining achievement in the development of modern linguistics: a move away from nineteenth-century philology in theory and prescriptive approaches to language use in instruction manuals and classrooms. Part of what was sacrificed in this formation of modern linguistics, however, was attention to the way in which, where situational variation in language use occurs, what is at stake is not only whether usage is contextually appropriate (in the sense of being matched to a given situation) but how far and in what ways such usage is governed by social and historical stratification.

Developing in, among other sources, important insights in educational linguistics (e.g. in Bernstein's [Reference Bernstein1975] work on correlation between social class, linguistic performance and what he called control), power emerges as a research topic especially in critical discourse analysis, or CDA (e.g. in work during the 1970s by Fowler, later in widely influential publications by Fairclough, Wodak, Van Dijk and others). The main aim of the investigation in such work on different institutional settings (ranging from media discourse and doctor-patient interaction through to more visibly political communications) has been to show how unequal power relations and concealed ideological meanings are embedded in discourse and how they affect its interpretation, perceived status and other effects.

Discussion of power in law is for obvious reasons rather different. Not only is law the main public institution charged with dispensing, constraining and accounting for power in society, but it is transparently hierarchical in multiple ways: in its overall purpose (social ordering and control); in its institutional structure (authority expressed through a hierarchy of courts and law reports, as well as by symbolism and ritual); and linguistically (through rules stipulating the right to speak or not speak in given situations; whether what is said by someone will be presumed true, authoritative, or even admissible; and what actions follow from what someone in any given legal capacity says or writes). Questions about power in law are as a result less to do with whether power relations exist, or can be exposed, or even what the regime creating such power relations is, to the extent that the system of authority is prescribed and explicit rather than hidden. Instead, the important issues concern the merits of those stated rules as regards their capability to deliver justice rather than inflict injustice (in whatever way the legal system conceives justice); and how far the rules governing use of power in legal procedures adequately characterise what actually happens.

What follows from this unique social status of law is arguably that critical work in the field needs to be especially vigilant in specifying the aims and scope of criticism: whether, for example, an analysis is claiming systemic critique or failure, for instance that some or all of the legal system is flawed; or whether the study in question is not challenging the validity or legitimacy of the legal system or of a particular legal measure but rather seeking to expose flaws in the application of law in a given case or set of circumstances (e.g. as a result of conflict of interest, judicial or procedural error, or individual corruption). Individual studies may involve a mix of these two kinds of critique. But levels of analysis and the precise relationship between them will be crucial, especially because persuasive criticisms will imply different lines of response: for example, application for judicial review or its equivalent (testing whether administrative procedures were followed); campaigns for justice in a particular case (possibly through reversal of a decision, retrial or even posthumous pardon); agitation for wider law reform; or still wider civil disobedience or generalised political opposition.

As is evident from these thumbnail accounts, a number of different streams in thinking about power converge in discussions of law and language and, as might be expected, have been responded to in different ways in leading studies. Applying linguistic techniques to recognised issues in law and criminology, for example, focusing on legal proceedings including courtroom trials, mediation and small-claims tribunals, a series of publications by Conley and O'Barr has looked at class and power relations (see O'Barr Reference O'Barr1982; Conley and O'Barr Reference Conley and O'Barr1990, Reference Conley and O'Barr1998). Tackling ‘access to justice’ issues, linguists have analysed verbal strategies employed in the courtroom (Cotterill Reference Cotterill2003), especially coercive aspects of courtroom questioning (Danet and Kermish Reference Danet, Kermish and Massery1978; Dunstan Reference Dunstan1980). Feminist scholars have sought to unmask patriarchal power in law, including its perpetuation through language (a particularly detailed analysis of how patriarchy persists in the law on domestic violence is Siegel Reference Siegel1996). Other studies have examined linguistic disadvantage faced by vulnerable populations such as children (Brennan Reference Brennan1995) and second-language speakers and speakers of non-standard varieties of language (Eades Reference Eades2003). The scope of court interpreters to influence the outcome of trials has been investigated from the perspective of use and potential misuse of delegated powers (Berk-Seligson Reference Berk-Seligson2002); and Angermeyer (Reference Angermeyer2015) has shown how institutional language practices affected the ability of minority litigants in New York City to participate in interpreter-mediated small-claims hearings.

In such legal-linguistic studies, which cut across topics and disciplines, it is inevitably a challenge to find common principles or unified research goals and method. Distinctions of the kind previously outlined regarding what ‘power’ is, for example, are far easier to explore in theoretical abstraction than when articulated in the course of detailed arguments in which power is identified in some more specific topic or issue, typically in relation to perceived injustice. Understanding exactly how language contributes to power in law, and what the linguistic analysis of power in law can contribute to social change, will accordingly continue to be a challenge as well as an ambition for the field of law and language, alongside other challenges such as the ever-present need to negotiate fundamental differences between descriptive and normative approaches to language associated with the two respective fields. The chapters in this volume unsurprisingly reflect different intellectual traditions and values in relation to such issues. As they are presented together here, however, we are confident that they offer new ways to see important directions in which future (including critical) accounts of language in the law are likely to develop.

The Chapters

We conclude this Introduction with an overview of the individual chapters. In addition to the short summaries which follow, a longer headnote is provided immediately before each chapter, to expand such description and offer an indication of the chapter's scope and main arguments. To make it easier to use references, a separate list of references for cited works is given at the end of each chapter rather than in a consolidated bibliography for the whole book at the end.

Part I, concerning the character of legal language, begins with anthropologist Laura Nader's critical reflection on political effects she associates with core legal terms (Chapter 1). Nader argues that such terms are both idealised and abused in the United States. She describes how people's ability to perceive injustice is hindered by repeated exposure to a cluster of positive abstract words (not only directly law-related terms such as justice or the phrase the rule of law but also value terms including consensus, harmony and equality). The cumulative effect of such terms, Nader argues, is damaging where the words in question denote concepts that should help to prevent injustice. Rather than doing so, she suggests, such words convey unexamined ideological values, obscure their related negatives and perpetuate the political status quo. Law, Nader concludes – which is concerned as much with unspoken realities as with expressly articulated values – can be reduced by such language to merely an elaborate means of social control.

Alan Durant's essay (Chapter 2) looks at the history, current meaning and controversies surrounding the core expressions we use to describe law, including words such as law, justice, rights, authority and legitimacy. Drawing on an oddity noticed by the British jurist Glanville Williams, that law's ‘moderately precise technical language’ is ‘least precise in its most fundamental parts’ (Williams Reference Williams1945: 113), Durant shows how the words he examines convey varying and sometimes contradictory notions of what law is, even as they play a major role in creating law's legitimacy and in building sometimes fragile consensus around the relationship between law, public policy and changing social values.

Christopher Hutton (Chapter 3) scrutinises the seemingly transparent term ‘ordinary language’, which is frequently used in the course of judicial interpretation of the law to convey the idea of plain or commonsense, everyday meaning. Through an analysis of the wider intellectual history underpinning debates about what ordinary language is, Hutton shows why this phrase is anything but straightforward, and draws attention to interpretive practices it is used to describe and sometimes conceal. To illustrate his theoretical arguments, Hutton presents a case study in which he discusses appeals to the ordinary language categories of ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in case law related to transgender marriage in several jurisdictions.

The two essays in Part II explore conflicts between legal authority and social and cultural forces in specific jurisdictions.

Tracing the practice of including a eulogy in published laws in Nepal, Katsuo Nawa (Chapter 4) raises geopolitical as well as national questions about where the authority of law comes from. He tackles such issues by highlighting a clash between western notions of constitutionalism and the power exercised by the Nepalese monarchy until 2006. Interlingual indeterminacy, Nawa shows (i.e. slippage and uncertainty when concepts are transferred between languages) can lead to an unforeseen renegotiation of power relations – potentially serving new political or religious interests – where (usually smaller) jurisdictions transplant legal concepts from other, usually globally more influential legal systems.

Rather than examining circumstances in which legal authority is directly exercised, Marco Wan (Chapter 5) shows how tensions subjectively experienced by legal subjects may be expressed in the language of cinema, especially in settings where law is undergoing major change, is under political pressure or engenders social conflict. Combining theoretical and textual analysis, Wan develops a close reading of a vampire film produced in postcolonial Hong Kong. He shows how ‘legal subjectivity’ may be conveyed in socially important ways and at different levels by the language of film, not only in more explicitly articulated legal and political discourse.

The three chapters in Part III focus on legal meaning conveyed by silence and omission, simultaneously highlighting different methodological approaches.

Greg Matoesian and Kristin Enola Gilbert (Chapter 6) show the rhetorical power of gesture in legal advocacy. They present a set of analytical tools for describing non-verbal communication that is readily perceived but whose mechanisms are not generally well understood. Through their analysis of closing courtroom argument, Matoesian and Gilbert show how courtroom lawyers are able to synchronize speech, gesture and gaze in putting forward a case, using multiple parallel channels of forceful but largely unnoticed emphasis and reinforcement.

Liao Meizhen (Chapter 7) presents a comparative analysis of courtroom questioning in China and the United States. In doing so, he directs attention towards background assumptions about the nature of law, which are not obvious when any given jurisdiction is examined in isolation. Liao contrasts several aspects of questioning: when questions are asked, to whom, and why. He also describes the types of question asked. Viewed in a larger context, Liao's findings probe wider questions related to practical truth-finding, presumption of guilt, evidentiary requirements, participant roles and the overall purpose served by trials.

Through historical analysis, Siddharth Narrain (Chapter 8) explores hate speech as an increasingly contested terrain. When the phenomenon is considered globally, Narrain argues, entrenched positions are found both for regulating hate speech and for permitting it. He goes on to present a critical reading of the history of hate speech regulation in India, tracing it to circumstances under colonial rule which led to enactment of laws calculated to protect ‘wounded community sentiment’, especially in the area of religion. Narrain then charts the history forward from that point, taking his discussion into contemporary tensions triggered, he argues, by politicized use – even hijacking – of relevant legislation when mobilised by political or religious interest groups as a vehicle for suppressing minority voices rather than protecting them.

Part IV discusses the form and manner of legal communication in different legal domains, linking questions of the linguistic form of discourse to underlying ideologies.

Building on his earlier monograph examining multiple audiences for courtroom discourse (Heffer Reference Heffer2005), Chris Heffer (Chapter 9) introduces a model he has developed to account for courtroom miscommunication (the Voice Projection Framework). Heffer then applies his model to a legally minor but controversial recent British case. He explains why communication breakdown can easily occur between judges and jurors and links such breakdown in part to the institutional design of courtroom interaction. Heffer's analysis builds into a critique of courtroom discourse, which he tests against the complexity of the multiple purposes trials need to serve in a common law system.

Janny HC Leung (Chapter 10) analyses the political significance of different methods used in legal translation. Ethnocentrism and ideology, she shows, have an impact on lexical and other choices made in translating. While processes of legal translation are rarely subject to public scrutiny, Leung argues, it is possible to show how particular approaches to legal translation reflect power relations and to assess the role different approaches play in maintaining or potentially challenging aspects of social structure. Opposing the common perception that law is an abstract formal system beyond the reach of such considerations, Leung critiques continuing lack of attention paid to power asymmetry in theories of legal translation.

The final section of the book exposes tensions between what language is used in law to achieve and the constraints on doing so that can be exposed by linguistic analysis and commentary.

Janet Ainsworth (Chapter 11) draws attention to inherent difficulties in cross-cultural communication. She suggests that such difficulties create problems both for linguistic minorities in a given jurisdiction and for legal practitioners seeking to understand legal systems other than their own. Ainsworth asks how far the reasoning processes relied on in legal procedures are affected by variation in the grammatical and other structures of different natural languages. Revisiting the idea of ‘linguistic relativity’, or structural variation between languages that gives distinctive shape to concept formation by the speakers of any given language, Ainsworth concludes that such linguistic differences should be taken into account in bilingual courtrooms.

Lawrence Solan and Sandra Dahmen (Chapter 12) outline challenges associated with using spoken language as legal evidence. They highlight dangers that extend beyond the kinds of semantic indeterminacy associated with interpretation of legal documents. Solan and Dahmen review how courts have dealt with disputed transcription and illustrate how linguists can sometimes assist the courts in resolving speech perception difficulties. Although their chapter focuses on the English language, many of Solan and Dahmen's insights are generalisable to spoken communication in other languages.

The book ends with an ‘Afterword’ by Peter Goodrich (Chapter 13). Goodrich's work over three decades has explored many of the kinds of gaps and silences in approaches to the analysis of legal language that have been outlined earlier in this Introduction. In his concluding chapter, he uses the ‘unspoken words’ trope offered by the conceptualisation of this book as a route into dissecting the relation in law between the said and the unsaid. Rather than viewing the two as a dichotomy, Goodrich addresses their dependency on each other. Linking his comments about particular features of legal language with wider issues about the nature of law, Goodrich points to the conundrum that, in legal discourse as elsewhere, the unsaid can only be accessed through what is said – but the said can only be understood in context of what remains unsaid.