Just Words: Law, Language, and Power (Chicago Series in Law and Society) - Hardcover

Conley, John M.; O'Barr, William M.; Riner, Robin Conley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022648422X ISBN 13: 9780226484228

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Is it &;just words&; when a lawyer cross-examines a rape victim in the hopes of getting her to admit an interest in her attacker? Is it &;just words&; when the Supreme Court hands down a decision or when business people draw up a contract? In tackling the question of how an abstract entity exerts concrete power, Just Words focuses on what has become the central issue in law and language research: what language reveals about the nature of legal power. 

John M. Conley, William M. O'Barr, and Robin Conley Riner show how the microdynamics of the legal process and the largest questions of justice can be fruitfully explored through the field of linguistics. Each chapter covers a language-based approach to a different area of the law, from the cross-examinations of victims and witnesses to the inequities of divorce mediation. Combining analysis of common legal events with a broad range of scholarship on language and law, Just Words seeks the reality of power in the everyday practice and application of the law. As the only study of its type, the book is the definitive treatment of the topic and will be welcomed by students and specialists alike. This third edition brings this essential text up to date with new chapters on nonverbal, or &;multimodal,&; communication in legal settings and law, language, and race.
 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John M. Conley is the William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina Law School. William M. O&;Barr is professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University where he also holds appointments in the Departments of English and Sociology. Robin Conley Riner is associate professor of anthropology at Marshall University. 
 

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Just Words

Law, Language, and Power

By John M. Conley, William M. O'Barr, Robin Conley Riner

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2019 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-48422-8

Contents

Preface to the Third Edition, 
Preface to the Second Edition, 
Preface, 
Note on Transcript Conventions, 
1 The Politics of Law and the Science of Talk, 
2 The Revictimization of Rape Victims, 
3 The Language of Mediation, 
4 Speaking of Patriarchy, 
5 A Natural History of Disputing, 
6 The Discourses of Law in Cross-Cultural Perspective, 
7 Language Ideology and the Law, 
8 Forensic Linguistics, 
9 Multimodal Communication in the Courtroom, 
10 Language and Race in the Courtroom, 
11 Conclusion, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Politics of Law and the Science of Talk

Almost forty years have passed since we (O'Barr and Conley) began our own collaborative work at the intersection of law and language, and there is little in the field that is much older. The body of work that we consider here did not begin as the product of some theoretical master plan. Rather, it initially coalesced as scholars of diverse intellectual backgrounds arrived from many directions at the common realization that the language of the law is profoundly important. Some whose primary interest is the law have been struck by the centrality of language in almost every legal event, while others whose main interest is language have discovered the law as an extraordinary research setting. Collectively — if often unaware of each other — the members of this sometimes accidental alliance have produced the subject matter of this book.

When we first turned our attention to the subject in the mid-1970s, most scholarship that considered law and language focused on written legal language, especially the arcane language of statutes and legal documents. Although we found many articles and books that noted in passing the importance of the linguistic base of the law, we found only a single source that dealt with law and language in any real depth. This was David Mellinkoff's monumental The Language of the Law (1963), which analyzes the structure of written legal language and explains the Latin, French, and Anglo-Saxon origins of contemporary usages. It took a new generation of language-oriented fieldworkers with sociological, anthropological, and sociolinguistic backgrounds to initiate a broader study of the language of the law as it operates in the many venues of daily practice. Beginning in about 1970, this new generation of researchers went to the places where people actually talk about their troubles and express their claims and began to study what happens there. It is their scholarship that provides the foundation for our argument about the importance of language and discourse in understanding law and legal processes.

In the first edition of this book, we grouped those who have studied law and language in this latter way into three general categories. One group focused explicitly and self-consciously on language as the medium through which law does most of its work. Early research in this category was exemplified by Brenda Danet's (1980a) demonstration of the strategic significance of alternative ways of naming and categorizing objects and actions, as well as by our own investigations of the practical legal consequences of differences in courtroom speech styles (Conley et al. 1978; O'Barr 1982). A second category consisted of people interested primarily in language itself who found that legal and quasi-legal settings are a rich linguistic resource. Important early examples included four ethnomethodologists: Gail Jefferson (1980, 1985, 1988), who began to study talk about troubles in everyday contexts as a part of a more general investigation of conversation; Anita Pomerantz (1978), some of whose early research focused on how blame is managed in conversation; and Max Atkinson and Paul Drew (1979), who studied English court proceedings as specialized exercises in the management of conversation. The third group comprised researchers who were less self-conscious in their focus on linguistic issues but ended up paying close attention to the language of legal processes in order to explain the workings of the legal system. For example, in Susan Silbey and Sally Merry's (1986) ethnographic study of community mediation, language emerged as a central issue even though the researchers themselves had little formal background in linguistics.

The particular body of work that is our focus here has introduced another important variable into the law-language equation: power. This research looks at the law's language in order to understand the law's power. Its premise is that power is not a distant abstraction but rather an everyday reality. For most people, the law's power manifests itself less in Supreme Court decisions and legislative pronouncements than in the details of legal practice, in the thousands of mini-dramas reenacted every day in lawyers' offices, police stations, and courthouses around the country — and, as we are becoming increasingly aware, in the streets, during traffic stops and other kinds of police-civilian interactions. Language is a critical element in almost every one of these mini-dramas, even those that escalate to violence. To the extent that power is realized, exercised, abused, or challenged in such events, the means are in large part linguistic. This book is a search for those linguistic means.

Focusing simultaneously on law, language, and power can give us new insight into what has been the fundamental question in American legal history: how a legal system that aspires to equality can produce such a pervasive sense of unfair treatment. In the one hundred fifty years since the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and its guarantee of equal protection, normative legal reform has succeeded, at least on some levels, in eradicating the most obvious forms of discrimination. The law permits all citizens to vote and hold public office. Federal and state laws prohibit employment discrimination on grounds of race, religion, gender, disability, age, and sometimes sexual orientation. No one may be excluded from public benefits for discriminatory reasons. In the courtroom, all criminal defendants are entitled to be represented by counsel. All citizens are eligible for jury duty, and lawyers may not rely on race or gender in selecting jurors for particular cases. Race is not a legitimate factor for judges to consider in sentencing.

Yet in the face of such undeniable progress in the law's ideals, there is still widespread unease about the fairness of the law's application. One can sense the problem just by spending time in a courthouse and paying attention to the daily routine. Listen to the way that police officers and judges speak to women seeking domestic violence restraining orders. Listen to the way that mediators interact with husbands and wives in divorce cases. Observe the reactions of judges and jurors to the testimony of different kinds of witnesses. Talk to small claims magistrates about what constitutes a persuasive case. Nobody is doing anything that the Supreme Court would condemn as a violation of equal protection. But it is hard to escape the feeling that the law's power is more accessible to some people than to others.

What is it that gives rise to this feeling? Why do many people continue to think that the law does not treat them fairly? The...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022648422X
• ISBN 13: 9780226484228
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 3
• Anzahl der Seiten: 239
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar