Dieter Stein

Introduction: Forensic Translation — Practical Issues and their Theoretical Underpinnings

This volume addresses a topic that assumes an increasing significance in contact situations between legal cultures in everyday practice of law as reflected in practical problems of translation, as well as a theoretical problem of clash and convergence of legal cultures, again reflected in linguistic issues. While the issues in the circumference of contact between legal systems have traditionally been discussed in comparative law, extensively represented in this volume, these issues acquire a new significance through the fact that legal systems are no longer static, a priori given systems, but are themselves subject to change, to issues of mutual influence, to issues of convergence and divergence. The volume hopes to achieve a balance between practical issues and theoretical underpinnings of these issues that may provide a rationale for practical solutions.

“Begin at the beginning”. Lawyers and Linguists Together in Wonderland

What do patterns in legal language tell us about power, policy and justice? This question was at the heart of a conference on “The Fabric of Language and Law: Discovering Patterns through Legal Corpus Linguistics”, convened in March 2016 by the international research group “Computer Assisted Legal Linguistics” (CAL²) under the auspices of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. About forty scholars from Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Poland, Spain and the US brought together their different intellectual and disciplinary perspectives on computational linguistics and legal thinking. Concluding the conference, four legal linguistics experts – two native linguists, two native lawyers – discussed the perspectives and limitations of computer-assisted legal linguistics. Their debate, which this article faithfully reproduces, touches on some of the essential epistemological issues of interdisciplinary research and evidence-based policy, and marks the way forward for legal corpus linguistics. Cite as: Vogel et al. , JLL 6 (2017), 90–100, DOI: 10.14762/jll.2017.090

Introducing “Language & Law”

to the journal of the International Language and Law Society (www.illa.org). All manner of all scientific discourse is couched in language. This holds for language in the domain of law with a vengeance: all concepts in law are linguistically constituted and expressed. All legally relevant meanings and contexts are transported through the vehicle of language. They are thus created through and in language, and cannot therefore be independent of language, just as the law cannot be independent of society, which is where language resides. While the laws of nature would be valid even if nobody would ever have verbalized them, the laws of society only come about via communication. The laws of society do not exist before they are debated and negotiated. The “meaning”–and the change of meaning–of concepts in law, as well as the “interpretation” of terms is to a large extent some kind of linguistic analysis, with attendant and persistent problems including issues of vagueness, ambiguity, precision and “plainness”. Apart from this inherent fundamental affinity between language and law, there are numerous ways in which the legal process at various stages involves language in negotiations or contestations, such as court proceedings or police interviews, for which linguistic analysis has developed well-established concepts of description and explanation. These concepts can be taken up to elucidate the legal process and help analyze and teach successful procedure. Language, languages, and dialects are themselves often the issue in many legal procedures around the world, apart from the language-related issues of access to justice. In addition, there are many ways in which law, language and society are inextricably interrelated. Law-makers and judges should be supplied with a body of scientific knowledge to draw upon in making their decisions. It is therefore appropriate that an international society should advance and focus research on the interdependence of language and law in all of its facets, from theoretical approaches to the resolution of practical issues. With the world moving together ever closer in trade, law and communication, it is appropriate that the study of language in law comprise all points of interface between these disciplines. As these issues appear in law generally and are not restricted to a particular JLL 1 (2012): 1–2