Edited by Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein, the Foundations in Language and Law series aims beyond the traditional surveys of scholarship in law and language. Monographs in the series will provide foundational materials - theoretical, methodological, critical, practical - to advance study of important topics in the field. And even as each volume engages conceptually with current scholarship in the area, it presents original research which breaks new ground and indicates future directions for scholarship in law and language. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

This is that rare book which both informs and entertains. It is scholarly and sprightly - an unusual combination for any book, let alone one treating of the law. Lawyers and laymen alike can read it with profit and amusement. I hope many do, for it deserves a wide audience. The Honorable Arthur J. Goldberg (1908-1990), United States Supreme Court, The New York Herald Tribune A superb piece of writing, lucid, witty, meticulous in scholarship and unfailingly interesting. Robert R. Kirsch, Los Angeles Times We now have a full-scale study of our legal language that is written with an extraordinary awareness for vacuous words and phrases and an astounding amount of research into their history and usage.... This book has a practical value to every lawyer who drafts a document, a pleading, or even a letter. It is a great plea to bring the law up to date by awakening us to the empty verbalisms in which we think we are housing our thoughts.... It is a rare book that has value for all lawyers, despite the tendency of publishers and reviewers to make this claim with great frequency. Here, however, is a rarity. No lawyer could fail to learn many facts of surprising interest. But beyond this, 'The Language of the Law' presents a subtle challenge to the American Bar, a stimulus to improve our work and our profession by sharpening the product of our minds. If we meet this challenge head-on, we can perform a far more fundamental and genuine service to our clients, the public, and to ourselves than any other area of improvement, including court reform, can possibly offer. Ray D. Henson, American Bar Association Journal It should be compulsory reading for lawyers and judges; for a layman it is learning and entertainment of high order. The Honorable Matthew O. Tobriner (d. 1982), Associate Justice, Supreme Court of California, San Francisco Chronicle ...[B]rilliant and discursive treatise, concisely and urbanely presented,...a remarkable stimulus, recommended highly to the general reader as well as the wordy professional. Hugo Sonnenschein, Jr., Chicago Daily News

The world of law has changed in the last decades: it has become more globalized, multilingual and digital. The sections and contributions of this volume continue the interdisciplinary discussion about the challenges of this change for theory and practice of law and for the International Language and Law Association (ILLA) relaunched in 2017. First, the book gives a broad overview to the research field of legal linguistics, its history, research directions and open questions in different parts of the world (United States, Africa, Italy, Spain, Germany, Nordic countries and Russia). The second section consists of contributions about the relation of language, law and justice in a globalized world with a focus on multilingual and supranational law in the EU. The third section focuses on digitalization and mediatization of the law, the last section reports about the discussion at the ILLA relaunch conference in 2017.

The concept of learning to ‘think like a lawyer’ is one of the cornerstones of legal education in the United States and beyond. In this book, Jeffrey Lipshaw provides a critique of the traditional views of ‘thinking like a lawyer’ or ‘pure lawyering’ aimed at lawyers, law professors, and students who want to understand lawyering beyond the traditional warrior metaphor. Drawing on his extensive experience at the intersection of real world law and business issues, Professor Lipshaw presents a sophisticated philosophical argument that the "pure lawyering" of traditional legal education is agnostic to either truth or moral value of outcomes. He demonstrates pure lawyering’s potential both for illusions of certainty and cynical instrumentalism, and the consequences of both when lawyers are called on as dealmakers, policymakers, and counsellors. This book offers an avenue for getting beyond (or unlearning) merely how to think like a lawyer. It combines legal theory, philosophy of knowledge, and doctrine with an appreciation of real-life judgment calls that multi-disciplinary lawyers are called upon to make. The book will be of great interest to scholars of legal education, legal language and reasoning as well as professors who teach both doctrine and thinking and writing skills in the first year law school curriculum; and for anyone who is interested in seeking a perspective on ‘thinking like a lawyer’ beyond the litigation arena.

Language and the Law: Global Perspectives in Forensic Linguistics from Africa and beyond is the third volume in a series of books designed to contribute and respond to growing interest in forensic linguistics or language and the law on the African continent. Drawing mostly on contexts where traditional African laws and Western laws are practised side-by-side, and where there are discontinuities between local knowledge systems, belief systems and language practices on the one hand, and official languages of law discourse, conceptualisation and jurisprudence documentation on the other, the chapters in this volume problematise, among other issues, the mediation practices (or lack thereof) of language and legal processes, discourse strategies and complexities in (mis)interpretations in second language court contexts and the miscarriage of justice that these may entail.

This intriguing collection of essays by David Nelken examines the relationship between law, society and social theory and the various ideas social theorists have had about the actual and ideal 'fit' between law and its social context. It also asks how far it is possible to get beyond this mainstream paradigm. The value of social theorising for studying law is illustrated by specific developments in substantive areas such as housing law, tort law, the law of evidence and criminal law. Throughout the chapters the focus is on the following questions. What is gained (and what may be lost) by putting law in context? What attempts have been made to go beyond this approach? What are their (necessary) limits? Can law be seen as anything other than in some way both separate from and relating to 'the social'? The distinctiveness of this approach lies in its effort to keep in tension two claims. Firstly, that social theorising about legal practices is vitally important for understanding the connections between legal and social structures and revealing what law means and does for (and to) various social actors. The second point is that it does not follow that what we learn in this way can be assumed to be necessarily relevant to (re)shaping legal practices without further argument that pays heed to law's specificity.