Category Archives: Law

Compatibility of syntactic features of legal and plain English

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The research explores the compatibility of syntactic characteristics of legal English and plain English. The paper analyses the competition of linguistic means of expression between plain English and legal English. To this end, the paper (1) explores the characteristics of legal writing and identifies syntactic features that cause comprehension problems; (2) analyses syntactic features and means of expression of plain English; (3) investigates the
compatibility of the requirements for plain English with the characteristics of legal English.

The research is based on the Treaty of Lisbon. The findings prove that although formal requirements for legal English are compatible with the requirements for plain English, there is a great difference between the means of expression of the two variations. Nevertheless, plain English principles allow appropriate user-friendly syntactic competitors for most complicated cases of syntax in legal writing.

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Language and law issue 1 is out

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Language and Law / Linguagem e Direito is a free, exclusively online peer-reviewed journal published twice a year. It is available on the website of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto.
All articles should be submitted by email to the journal email address (llldjournal@gmail.com). See the guidelines for submission at the end of this issue.
Requests for book reviews should be sent to llldjournal@gmail.com.
Abstracts of PhD theses should be sent to the PhD Abstracts Editor, Dayane de Almeida (daycelestino@gmail.com).

Language and law website.

Call for papers: Language and Law / Linguagem e Direito Vol 2.1

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The editors of Language and Law / Linguagem e Direito (LL / LD), the new international bilingual bi-annual online journal, invite original unpublished contributions from researchers, academics and practitioners alike, in Portuguese or English. Articles are welcome in any area of forensic linguistics / language and the law for Volume 2.1, to be published in 2015.

Language and Law / Linguagem e Direito is completely electronic and freely available for everyone to download at http://llld.linguisticaforense.pt. Because Language and Law has no printing costs it can be extremely flexible to individual author’s requirements: not only can it publish quickly all the high quality articles it receives, but also it can cope with long appendices, reproduce illustrations, photographs and tables in full colour, as well embed sound files and hyperlinks.

All submissions must be made by email, in MS Word or Latex format, to the journal’s email address llldjournal@gmail.com. Manuscripts can vary in length, but we suggest that they should be between 4,500 and 8,000 words and be preceded by an abstract of no more than 150 words in the language of the article and, if possible, in the journal’s other language as well. The abstract should also include up to five keywords. Contributors should indicate in the body of the accompanying email their name, institutional affiliation and email address(es). Articles submitted for publication should not have been previously published nor submitted simultaneously for consideration elsewhere.

In submitting an article, authors cede to the journal the right to publish and republish it in both the journal languages. However, copyright remains with the authors. Thus, if they wish to republish, they simply need to inform the editors and on publication send complete bibliographical data.

The deadline for contributions is January 31, 2015. All papers will be double blind peer-reviewed by the end of March 2015 and the issue will be published by the end of July 2015.

For further information on the journal, templates and author guidelines, please visit the journal webpage: http://llld.linguisticaforense.pt

Malcolm Coulthard & Rui Sousa-Silva, Editors
Language and Law / Linguagem e Direito

New book The Education of a Lawyer @ABAesq

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The American Bar Association has published “The Education of a Lawyer”. The book is mostly advice from an attorney to college and law students as well as beginning lawyers, about the study of law and how to succeed in the legal profession. According to author Gary Muldoon, “it is by no means about forensic linguistics. Although, I do manage to get in a few digs about that subject, trying to let a broader readership know that Forensic Linguistics is an important and emerging area that they should attend do. (One essay in the book is “It all started with William the Conqueror.” And it acknowledges the work of Peter Tiersma.)

The book at present is available through the American Bar Association:
http://shop.americanbar.org/eBus/Store/ProductDetails.aspx?productId=213293

According to author Gary Muldoon (Muldoon, Getz & Reston) “The Education of a Lawyer” is a fairly easy read, and not overly academic. Though, one group of law students that read a draft of the manuscript commented that it was clearly written by somebody older.