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Language and lawNext Gen Literacies

Linguistic Diversity as a Challenge for Legal Policy

By January 31, 2022No Comments5 min read2,475 views

(Image credit: Tingey Injury Law Firm, via Unsplash)

The Griffith Law Review has just published a thematic issue on ‘Linguistic diversity as a challenge to legal policy’, which Laura Smith-Khan and I initiated and guest edited over the last two years.

Legal rules and policies about languages can have diverse, serious effects in the judicial system and beyond it, in administrative processes, in law-making (legislative) processes and in seeking to control the way people communicate in various aspects of public life, as we’ve discussed before on the Language on the Move “Language and Law” section.

Interdisciplinary law and linguistics research has emerged in response to a growing curiosity to better understand the potential inequalities and injustices, as we’ve discussed here before.

Yet until this thematic issue, the Griffith Law Review had never devoted an entire issue to language-based problems in laws and legal processes, and nor had it been a focus of legal scholarship more generally. We are hoping that our thematic issue opens readers’ eyes to language – particularly linguistic diversity – as a core concern of legal systems and legal scholarship that has been hiding in plain sight, and constructively links the resolution of concerns to legal policy reforms.

We include within ‘legal policy’ policies of differing form and formality, from court rules to ministerial guidelines to statutory regimes.

Our 11 contributing authors are almost all early career researchers from around Australia. They have diverse academic and professional backgrounds, spanning social sciences, humanities and law as well as professional experience teaching, practicing law and translating law, but they raise shared concerns.

The unifying concern to create better, more just legal policy is relevant to domestic and international audiences because linguistic diversity is part of the context in which most (if not all) legal systems operate. This diverse reality comes into conflict with monolingual processes in state institutions, entrenched beliefs about the value of monolingualism, and legal reifications of the essential linguistic identity of peoples and nations.

Our thematic issue includes the following research on linguistic diversity as a challenge to legal policy in legislative, administrative and judicial processes, with case studies mainly from Australia but also from overseas:

Griffith Law Review: Thematic Issue, ‘Linguistic diversity as a challenge to legal policy’ 2021, volume 30, issue 1.

Editorial

Our editorial proposes that more should be done to incorporate linguistic research within legal education. As future legal practitioners and law-makers, law students are an essential audience for this scholarship. Many of the policy suggestions across the research articles would be supported by corresponding reforms to legal education. We suggest that a workable first step could be for legal academics and linguistics academics to work together to develop, teach and share a unit. This is a timely discussion, given that the 11 compulsory subjects across Australian law schools (the ‘Priestly 11’) are currently under review.

In support of this proposition, our editorial reports on a sample inquiry we made into current offerings for university students in New South Wales (NSW) and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). Overall, this small study found that while a range of subjects appear to touch upon one or more intersections of linguistic and legal scholarship, there are few that offer this intersection as a focus. Across 11 public universities in NSW, we identified only three university courses on language and law offered within law degrees, at the University of Technology Sydney, University of New England and Southern Cross University, while in the ACT, the Australian National University (ANU) offers a forensic linguistics minor in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics. We also found (just a few) other university subjects touching on aspects of language and law while having other primary focuses. For example, the ANU offers ‘Literature, Law and Human Rights’ as a law degree elective. And we know from our teaching experience that most law schools offer a foundational subject in which characteristics of legal writing may be covered.

Courts and the justice system

Administrative rules and processes

Law-making in legislatures

Book reviews

Open Space

The Griffith Law Review is unusual in having an ‘Open Space’ section for non-traditional pieces. We’ve filled it with Bill Mitchell OAM’s 2020 speech on the just-commenced Human Rights Act 2019 (Qld), ‘Speech Pathologists as Human Rights Defenders’. Bill explains that ‘communication rights’ are ‘cross-cutting enablers of other rights’, including legislatively-enshrined rights to freedom of expression, recognition of equality before the law, cultural rights, freedom from cruel and inhuman or degrading treatment in institutional settings, and rights to education and health services. This emphasis on language practices and language rights as gateways to full and fair legal participation and protection echoes the thematic issue’s research articles.

We are proud to have assembled these contributions revealing current, specific issues of linguistic (in)justice as well as thoughtful and practical paths forward; we hope you enjoy reading about them!

Alexandra Grey

Author Alexandra Grey

Alexandra is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, in the Faculty of Law. She researches governments' responses to linguistic diversity, including in relation to multilingual, urban Australia and Australian Aboriginal language renewal. Her first book, "Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study" (De Gruyter, 2021), builds from her PhD thesis in sociolinguistics, which was supervised by Professor Ingrid Piller. Alexandra also teaches law and was formerly a legal researcher and advocacy trainer at a Chinese not-for-profit organization in Beijing.

More posts by Alexandra Grey

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