Legal-Lay Communication: Textual Travels in the Law (Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics)

This volume responds to a growing interest in the language of legal settings by situating the study of language and law within contemporary theoretical debates in discourse studies, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics. The chapters in the collection explore many of the common occasions when those acting on behalf of the legal system, such as the police, lawyers and judges, interact with those coming into contact with the legal system, such as suspects and witnesses. However the chapters do this work through the conceptual lens of 'textual travel', or the way that texts move across space and time and are transformed along the way. Collectively, notions of textual travel shed new light on the ways in which texts can influence, and are influenced by, social and legal life. With contributions from leading experts in language and law, __Legal-Lay Communication__ explores such 'textual travel' themes as the mediating role of technologies in the investigatory stages of the legal process, the centrality of intertextuality in the legal construction of cases in court, the transformative effects of recontextualization in processes of judicial decision-making, and the way that processes of textual travel disturb the apparent permanence of legal categorization. The book challenges both the notion of legal text as a static repository of meaning and the very idea of legal-lay or lay-legal communication. Cover 1 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Contributors 12 Introduction 18 1. Textual Travel in Legal-Lay Communication 20 PART ONE: Police Investigation as Textual Mediation 50 2. The Transformation of Discourse in Emergency Calls to the Police 52 3. From Legislation to the Courts: Providing Safe Passage for Legal Texts through the Challenges of a Police Interview 72 4. “Every Link in the Chain”: The Police Interview as Textual Intersection 95 PART TWO: The Legal Case as Intertextual Construction 122 5. ‘Theatricks’ in the Courtroom: The Intertextual Construction of Legal Cases 124 6. Travels of a Suspect’s Statement 143 7. Embedding Police Interviews in the Prosecution Case in the Shipman Trial 164 8. Tracing Crime Narratives in the Palmer Trial (1856): From the Lawyer’s Opening Speeches to the Judge’s Summing Up 185 PART THREE: Judicial Discourse as Legal Recontextualization 204 9. Post-Penetration Rape and the Decontextualization of Witness Testimony 206 10. Communication and Magic: Authorized Voice, Legal-Linguistic Habitus, and the Recontextualization of “Beyond Reasonable Doubt” 223 11. Troubling the Legal – Lay Distinction: Litigant Briefs, Oral Argument, and a Public Hearing about Same-Sex Marriage 243 PART FOUR: Crossing Cultural and Ideological Categories in Lay – Legal Communication 262 12. The Discourse of DNA: Giving Informed Consent to Genetic Research 264 13. Travelling Texts: The Legal – Lay Interface in The Highway Code 283 14. Recalling Rape: Moving Beyond What We Know 305 Index 324 A 324 B 325 C 326 D 329 E 331 F 331 G 332 H 333 I 334 J 335 K 336 L 336 M 337 N 339 O 339 P 340 Q 342 R 342 S 345 T 346 U 347 V 348 W 348 Y 349 Z 349 Provides an engaging and thought-provoking exploration of the way texts emerging in the legal process 'travel' in various ways to produce new forms and new meanings in new contexts.