Linguistics meets law

This time two years ago, Alexandra Grey (my blog co-author) and I had realized that there were important strands of research underway in Australia and around the world in which linguistic and legal scholarship and practices were made relevant to one another, and we started talking more and more about how to better share knowledge between these researchers. It seemed that this research was disparate and that opportunities for interdisciplinary scholars to meet, collaborate and publish together were sporadic. We also wanted to build a clearer public profile to amplify emerging, interdisciplinary scholars like ourselves.

Our focus was not just the particularities and painfulness of legal jargon, so we didn’t fit the “Plain English” profile. And neither of us would have said our research could use the label “forensic linguistics” in the sense of investigating crime, or even in a broader sense of relating to language issues in courts. And yet we had a lot of interest in forensic linguists and other researchers we chanced upon who were combining law and language studies. Oftentimes we also had shared methods, and background reading, and problems. Despite this inchoate but real shared interest, we found there was little in the way of a cohesive articulation of how (or whether) there are theoretical and methodological bases upon which a field – sometimes also called ‘legal linguistics’ – is developing. We believed that this was limiting collaboration and limiting the strength with which researchers could present their work to audiences from distinct disciplines, particularly to legal scholars and practitioners.

So, we launched the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN) in early 2019, with a workshop-focused symposium for 31 participants. LLIRN closed out 2019 with 93 listserv members! We ended the year with LLIRN members presenting at the interdisciplinary Humboldt Symposium on ‘Sharing Knowledge’. With the support from the Humboldt Foundation, we also provided two scholarships for postgraduate student members to attend that conference. A couple of weeks later, we formed a panel of legal practitioners, researchers from the Federal Government’s forthcoming National Indigenous Languages Report, and early career researchers, to discuss linguistic diversity as a challenge to legal policy at the annual Australian Linguistics Society conference. We also sourced questions for that panel through LLIRN! We hope the momentum of LLIRN activities initiated by us and by our members continues into 2020. As we look back on the first year of its existence what have we LLIRNed so far? (Surely a pun this bad befits the season of Christmas cracker jokes.)

These events have been a good opportunity to reflect on our motivations and hopes for organizing the LLIRN. Over the last few years, we had both read, applied and contributed to research at the intersection of law and linguistics, as law school postdocs and, before that, as we undertook our doctorates together at Macquarie University’s Department of Linguistics. In brief, Alex’s doctorate was a legal and ethnographic examination of China’s constitutional minority language rights and Laura’s was on discourse, power and language ideology in official asylum seeker applications processes and political and media discourse in Australia.

Plus, we had had incredibly enriching experiences as part of the Language on the Move research group and therefore knew the value of building research networks of peers, mentors and mentees, sharing research findings, and building research leadership skills. It was through our participation in this group that we met each other, and developed a relationship of collaborating, organizing events and providing each other feedback on our work, sharing experiences and advice around publishing and career progression. So we were inspired to build a similar network at the junction of legal and linguistic research.

Purposefully expanding beyond our scholastic comfort zone, we sought to bring together researchers with varied approaches, including scholars of language rights and policy; forensic linguists; court translation and interpretation specialists; discourse analysts looking at varied state processes and state agencies, legislative corpus researchers, those concerned with diversity and equality, and those who teach university courses about language and the law. We identified and invited researchers from around Australia, as well as some international participants and an international keynote speaker, from a range of disciplines, and at all career stages to our inaugural Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Symposium in April 2019 at Sydney Law School.

To build up awareness and community between these participants, the theme of our inaugural symposium was: ‘What do we share?’ A seemingly simple question… To help answer it, we sent out a 10-question survey, asking our inaugural symposium’s participants about their qualifications, affiliations, methods, theoretical approaches, and subject matter.

Amongst the initial participants, there was a high proportion with tertiary qualifications in both law and linguistics. Many also had first-hand or up-close experience of being a learner of a second or subsequent language, and many had experience applying academic knowledge in non-academic settings, including policy work, legal practice, professional translation and interpreting and non-academic linguistic work. Because of these applied jobs and disciplinary cross-overs, the need to communicate nuanced, research-based knowledge in accessible and practical ways has been a familiar challenge on the radar of LLIRN from the outset.

We proposed, at the symposium, that the emerging field coheres around three broad research problems – language-related social justice, regulation of language, and inequalities and hurdles in bureaucratic processes – and five key types of phenomena being studied: speech/language variation; language ideologies; intercultural (mis)communication; rules and policy; and processes of social and political change. We asked participants to consider these ‘nodes’ and whether their research could be described in these terms. Over the year, we have refined them, and are keen to continue the discussion!

The theme of ‘regulation of language’ is perhaps better described as ‘harmonizing and/or improving the regulation of language’, i.e. a critical and applied orientation rather than a descriptive, typological orientation to language policy. In addition, our recent ALS panel’s discussant, the Hon. Peter Gray, suggested we drill down into types of legal policy: policies about the legal system and courts; administrative rules and processes; and legislation are distinct from one another not only in their forms but also in their agents, their motivations, and their responsiveness to linguistic diversity and linguistic research.

We opted for an interactive workshop approach at the inaugural symposium. The interactive sessions included discussions of how to conceptualize this emerging research field, debates, challenges and solutions in our research and teaching, and a ‘collaboration fair’. In the collaboration fair, participants could propose questions, events or publications on which they would like to collaborate, and ‘sign up’ to cooperate in others’ requests, then talk immediately to each other about these collaborations. After the symposium, we migrated all the suggested projects and expressions of interest into a shared online folder, so that attendees could go back, and new LLIRN members could join in by adding themselves or contacting others who had expressed a shared interest. Another LLIRNing from the year is that people engage in developing these links with one another far better in person than online, so another symposium is in store for 2020!

2019 has shown us that there is a particular interest in LLIRN amongst Higher Degree Research students and Early Career Researchers. The network is beginning to show its value as a platform to develop mentoring, and its potential to create postgraduate research supervision opportunities. In fact, it has been very gratifying to us to have become ad hoc mentors to researchers even earlier in their careers than us who have approached us through the network. Many of these members report not having known that anyone else was pursuing the overlap of law and linguistics in which they, themselves, had developed an interest. Having a group identity and receiving recommendations and introductions through our members is so valuable given that this intersecting research area is not always well known or represented.

Ongoing challenges for LLIRN include how to communicate our research to key stakeholders in other research disciplines or beyond academia. Given our disparate approaches and the need to work within existing institutional structures, we continue to seek innovative ways to collaborate and share our knowledge and successes with each other and with those whom our work could benefit or should influence. We cannot over-emphasize the importance of events and activities that demonstrate or discuss sharing knowledge with researchers from a range of disciplines.

So please join us at https://mailman.sydney.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/law_linguistics_network to propose collaborative publications and presentations, promote new law and linguistics research, and meet LLIRNers from around the world!