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Overview
Is it "just words" when a lawyer cross-examines a rape victim in the hopes of getting her to admit an interest in her attacker? Is it "just words" when the Supreme Court hands down a decision or when business people draw up a contract? In tackling the question of how an abstract entity exerts concrete power, Just Words focuses on what has become the central issue in law and language research: what language reveals about the nature of legal power.
Conley and O'Barr show how the microdynamics of the legal process and the largest questions of justice can be fruitfully explored through the field of linguistics. Each chapter covers a language-based approach to a different area of the law, from the cross-examinations of victims and witnesses to the inequities of divorce mediation. Combining analysis of common legal events with a broad range of scholarship on language and law, Just Words seeks the reality of power in the everyday practice and application of the law. As the only study of its type, the book is the definitive treatment of the topic that will be welcomed by students and specialists alike.
Synopsis
Is it "just words" when a lawyer cross-examines a rape victim in the hopes of getting her to admit an interest in her attacker? Is it "just words" when the Supreme Court hands down a decision or when business people draw up a contract? In tackling the question of how an abstract entity exerts concrete power, Just Words focuses on what has become the central issue in law and language research: what language reveals about the nature of legal power.
Conley and O'Barr show how the microdynamics of the legal process and the largest questions of justice can be fruitfully explored through the field of linguistics. Each chapter covers a language-based approach to a different area of the law, from the cross-examinations of victims and witnesses to the inequities of divorce mediation. Combining analysis of common legal events with a broad range of scholarship on language and law, Just Words seeks the reality of power in the everyday practice and application of the law. As the only study of its type, the book is the definitive treatment of the topic that will be welcomed by students and specialists alike.
Booknews
The authors argue for the importance of studying the language-based details of daily legal practice, showing how the microdynamics of the legal process and broad questions of justice can be meaningfully explored through the field of linguistics. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Editorials
Booknews
The authors argue for the importance of studying the language-based details of daily legal practice, showing how the microdynamics of the legal process and broad questions of justice can be meaningfully explored through the field of linguistics. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.Patricia Ewick
Patricia Ewick, Department of Sociology, Clark UniversityJust Words: Law, Language, and Power, by Conley and O'Barr, is a self-conscious exercise in translation. Troubled by both the impenetrability of most sociolinguistic research and its inattentiveness to matters beyond the logic and organization of discourse itself, Conley and O'Barr have written a book that maps the connection between what they call microdiscourse (or, talk) in legal settings and structural and cultural patterns of inequality. They do this in a language that is transparent and teacherly. Indeed, the entire organization of the book is intended (or so it would appear) to introduce to a relatively uninformed audience the basic conceptual and analytic tools of socio-linguistic research and its usefulness for understanding the persistence of inequality in the law.