Linguistics and Law

Undergraduate

is an overview of the many relationships between linguistics and the judicial process. Topics to be covered include: the language of legal texts, and the Plain English movement; language use in legal settings (such as eyewitness testimony, jury instructions, and the language of lawyer-client interactions); the legal disadvantages which language may impose on speakers of minority languages and non-standard dialects; and the emerging discipline of forensic linguistics (which deals with such issues as voice and authorship identification, and linguistic interpretation of evidence).