Language plays an essential role both in creating law and in governing its implementation. Providing an accessible and comprehensive introduction to this subject, Language and Law: describes the different registers and genres that make up spoken and written legal language and how they develop over time; analyses real-life examples drawn from court cases from different parts of the world, illustrating the varieties of English used in the courtroom by speakers occupying different roles; addresses the challenges presented to our notions of law and regulation by online communication; discusses the complex role of translation in bilingual and multilingual jurisdictions, including Hong Kong and Canada; and provides readings from key scholars in the discipline, including Lawrence Solan, Peter Goodrich, Marianne Constable, David Mellinkoff, and Chris Heffer. With a wide range of activities throughout, this accessible textbook is essential reading for anyone studying language and law or forensic linguistics. Sections A, B, and C of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315436258

'Legal English' will enable students to confidently write on and discuss legal topics as well as conduct legal work - such as drafting legal documentation, negotiating, litigating, advising, presenting, writing and acting as an advocate.

This book provides a state-of-the-art account of past and current research in the interface between linguistics and law. It outlines the range of legal areas in which linguistics plays an increasing role and describes the tools and approaches used by linguists and lawyers in this vibrant new field. Through a combination of overview chapters, case studies, and theoretical descriptions, the volume addresses areas such as the history and structure of legal languages, its meaning and interpretation, multilingualism and language rights, courtroom discourse, forensic identification, intellectual property and linguistics, and legal translation and interpretation. Encyclopedic in scope, the handbook includes chapters written by experts from every continent who are familiar with linguistic issues that arise in diverse legal systems, including both civil and common law jurisdictions, mixed systems like that of China, and the emerging law of the European Union.

This history of legal language slices through the polysyllabic thicket of legalese. The text shows to what extent legalese is simply a product of its past and demonstrates that arcane vocabulary is not an inevitable feature of our legal system.

This book tells what the language of the law is, how it got that way and how it works out in the practice. The emphasis is more historical than philosophical, more practical than pedantic.

This corpus-based study examines the lexical field of theft in the Anglo-Saxon law-codes and documents containing reports of lawsuits (charters, writs, and some chapters of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). The individual Old English lexemes are analysed not only in terms of their meaning, collocation patterns, and Latin translations, but also, more unusually in a field-approach, with reference to their distribution over the various textual genres and the discourse strategies dominant in these. Although primarily linguistic in focus, a detailed description of the theft-offences and the wider context in which they occur should also be of interest to the historian.