Language and law: a resource book for students

Language plays an essential role both in creating law and in governing its implementation.

In showing and examining how language plays these highly important social roles, this book addresses a wide range of topics, including: the different registers and genres which make up legal language and how they develop over time; the varieties of language used in the court room by speakers fulfilling different roles (judge, barrister, defendant, witness, etc.); how language is deployed and understood in technical ways, in legal drafting and interpretation; the use of language data as a specialised kind of evidence submitted in court cases; the challenges presented to our notions of law and regulation by new forms of online communication; the complex role of translation in bilingual and multilingual jurisdictions.