Language and Law

The emergence since the 1970s of social scientific and humanistic studies of law that orient to its linguistic, discursive, and textual features has added both empirical and critical theoretical perspectives to a study of legal language that diverges dramatically from what once was the domain of technicians of legal text and rhetoric. Resonant with the “linguistic turn” of the social sciences and the “sociocultural turn” of humanities, researchers with backgrounds in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, semiotics, and literature, among others, have converged around the structure and use of language and discourse in the expression and operation of the law. The earliest work in this area focused on the face-to-face interactions that constitute the legal process, including witness examination, judge-lawyer or judge-litigant exchanges, plea barging discourses, and even juror deliberation and lawyer-client interactions that happen out of public view. Much of it was conducted by social scientists and legal scholars taking seriously the main thesis of American legal realism, that law must be understood in the details of its actual processes, discursive or otherwise, and not just through the interpretive logics and internal histories of its legislative and judicial texts. More recently however, law and humanities scholars, as well as some social scientists, have returned to the language of legal texts, analyzing how their content is informed by narrative tropes from their sociocultural surround, but likewise by their materiality and mediation as documents, records, and files, of which the circulation between social actors figure importantly in law’s making. While their different disciplinary commitments result in different positions on a variety of methodological concerns—i.e., the need for empirical data to support their claims, the possibility and necessity of posing larger critical and/or normative interventions, and/or the value of offering policy reform recommendations, among others—most of these studies nonetheless concur on a basic vision of language use as a medium not only for reference to, but fundamentally for construction of social realities and orders. Legal language is thus understood as a central mode for the exercise of social power through law, and, increasingly, a focus of inquiry that figures centrally in sociolegal studies that considers how law is always a hermeneutic and empirical phenomenon. What counts as legal language scholarship is necessarily broadly scoped, ever widening, and susceptible to varied opinions about how to delimit it. Legal language scholarship is taken here to be all analyses of law—from both the social sciences and the humanities—that suggest a commitment to understanding law’s discursive and textual dimensions and their impact in shaping law’s force in the world. In the following sections, provided first is a list of texts that offers an overview of law and language scholarship, then a section listing Journals dedicated to sociolinguistic, semiotic, and interpretive approaches to law. The article then presents organized additional key scholarship, according to its origins in social scientific or humanities disciplines, with subheadings in each of these sections as relevant to important themes in the law and language literature.