Language and the Law (LAL)

This strand features research focusing on language-related issues in the legal domain which includes forensic linguistics, judicial processes, language in the courtroom, legal documents, international law, civil law, law enforcement, language policy in legal contexts, historical law, discourse on legal topics or issues, and community-based legal work on and involving civic engagement. Examples of potential topics at the intersection of language and law include forensic applications of linguistics (e.g. authorship attribution, threatening communication, trademark genericity, defamation), translation/interpretation in legal contexts, interpretation of statutes and other legal texts, linguistic complexity or readability of legal texts, linguistic descriptions of legal varieties of language, multilingual law, police-citizen interactions, language policy and planning, L2 speaker legal issues, linguistic bias in legal contexts, and legal discourses. This strand welcomes quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods analyses of written, spoken, and multimodal language data.