This bibliography contains some of the more important books and articles on language and law. I am sure that I have missed some items. Because it was taken from various works that I wrote using different citation conventions, the citation format is not always consistent, but there should be enough information to find any relevant source.
Entries are in alphabetical order.
Ainsworth, Janet. "In a Different Register: The Pragmatics of Powerlessness in Police Interrogation." 103 Yale L.J. 259 (1993).
Ainsworth, Janet. Linguistics as a Knowledge Domain in the Law,
54 Drake L. Rev. 651 (2006).
Asprey, Michèle M. Plain Language for Lawyers. 2d ed. Leichhardt, N.S.W.: The Federation Press, 1996.
Atkinson, J. Maxwell, and Paul Drew. Order in the Court: The Organization of Verbal Behavior in Judicial Settings. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979.
J. Baldwin & P. French. Forensic Phonetics. (London: Pinter, 1990).
Bennett, W.L. & M.S. Feldman, Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom. London: Tavistock Publications (1981).
Benson, Robert W. "The End of Legalese: The Game Is Over." 13 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 519 (1985).
Berk‑Seligson, Susan. The Bilingual Courtroom Court Interpreters in the Judicial Process (1990).
Bhatia, Vijay. "Cognitive Structuring in Legislative Provisions." In Language and the Law, edited by John Gibbons, 136. London and New York: Longman, 1994.
Bosmajian, Haig. Metaphor and Reason in Judicial Opinions. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.
Bowers, Frederick. Linguistic Aspects of Legislative Expression. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1989.
Charrow, Robert P., and Veda R. Charrow. "Making Legal Language Understandable: A Psycholinguistic Study of Jury Instructions." 79 Colum. L. Rev. 1306 (1979).
Chaski, Carole E. Empirical evaluations of language-based author identification techniques. 8 Forensic Linguistics 1 (2001).
Conley, John M., et al. "The Power of Language: Presentational Style in the Courtroom." 78 Duke L.J. 1375 (1978).
Conley, John M., and William M. O'Barr. Just Words: Law, Language, and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Conley, John M., and William M. O'Barr. Rules versus Relationships: The Ethnography of Legal Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Cotterill, Janet. Language in the legal process. Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave, 2002.
Janet Cotterill. Language and Power in Court : A Linguistic
Analysis of the O.J. Simpson Trial. Plagrave.
Coulthard, Malcolm. On the use of corpora in the analysis of forensic texts. 1 Forensic Linguistics 27 (1994).
Coulthard, Malcolm. Powerful evidence for the defence: an exercise in forensic discourse analysis. In J. Gibbons (Ed.), Language and the Law, 414 (1994).
Crystal, David, and Derek Davy. Investigating English Style. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969.
Cunningham, Clark D., et al. "Plain Meaning and Hard Cases." 103 Yale L.J. 1561 (1994).
Danet, Brenda. "'Baby' or 'Fetus'? Language and the Construction of Reality in a Manslaughter Trial." 32 Semiotica 187 (1980).
Danet, Brenda. "Language in the Legal Process." 14 Law & Society Rev. 445 (1980).
Danet, Brenda, et al. "An Ethnography of Questioning in the Courtroom." In Language Use and Uses of Language, edited by Roger W. Shuy and Anna Shnukal, 225. Washington, D.C.: University of Georgetown Press, 1980.
Danet, Brenda, and Bryna Bogoch. "Orality, Literacy and Performativity in Anglo-Saxon Wills." In Language and the Law, edited by John Gibbons, 100. London and New York: Longman, 1994.
Dickerson, Reed. The Interpretation and Application of Statutes. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1975.
Duarte i Montserrat, C., & A. Martinez. El Lenguaje Juridico. (Buenos Aires: A‑Z editora, 1995).
Dumas, Bethany K. "Adequacy of Cigarette Package Warnings: An Analysis of the Adequacy of Federally Mandated Cigarette Package Warnings." 59 Tenn. L. Rev. 261 (1992).
Eades, Diana. "A Case of Communicative Clash: Aboriginal English and the Legal System." In Language and the Law, edited by John Gibbons, 234. London and New York: Longman, 1994.
Eades, Diana. Aboriginal English and the Law: Communication with Aboriginal English speaking clients: A handbook for legal practitioners. (Brisbane, Queensland Law society, 1992).
Eades, Diana (ed.). Language in Evidence: Linguistic and Legal Perspectives in Multicultural Australia. (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995).
Eagleson, Robert D. Forensic analysis of personal written texts: A case study, in Language and the Law (J. Gibbons ed.) 363 (Harlow: Longman, 1994).
Eagleson, Robert D. "The Plain English Movement in Australia and the United Kingdom." In Plain English: Principles and Practice, edited by Erwin R. Steinberg, 30. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991.
Ehrlich, Susan. Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London: Routledge, 2001.
Elwork, Amiram, Bruce D. Sales, and James J. Alfini. Making Jury Instructions Understandable. Charlottesville, Va.: The Michie Co., 1982.
Eskridge, William N. "The New Textualism." 37 UCLA L. Rev. 621 (1990).
Finegan, Edward. "Form and Function in Testament Language." In Linguistics and the Professions, edited by Robert J. Di Pietro, 113. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Co., 1982.
Flesch, Rudolf. How to Write Plain English: A Book for Lawyers and Consumers. New York: Harper and Row, 1979.
Foster, Don. Author unknown: on the trail of Anonymous. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.
Friedman, Lawrence M. "Law and Its Language." 33 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 563 (1964).
Garner, Bryan A. A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Gibbons, John. Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language
in the Justice System. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Gibbons, John. Language and the Law. London and New York: Longman, 1994.
Goodrich, Peter. Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks. London: Weidenfeld, 1990.
Goodrich, Peter. Legal Discourse. London: Macmillan, 1987.
Green, Georgia M. Linguistic analysis of conversation as evidence regarding the interpretation of speech events, in J. N. Levi & A. G. Walker (eds.), Language in the judicial Process 247. New York, NY: Plenum Press, 1990.
Gumperz, John. Fact and inference in courtroom testimony, in John Gumperz (ed.), Language and Social Identity 163. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Gustafsson, Marita. Some Syntactic Properties of English Law Language. University of Turku, Publications of the Department of English, 1975.
Hiltunen, Risto. Chapters on Legal English: Aspects Past and Present of the Language of the Law. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1990.
Hollien, Harry. The Acoustics of Crime: The New Science of Forensic Phonetics. New York, NY: Plenum, 1990.
Jackson, Bernard S. Making Sense in Law: Linguistic, Psychological and Semiotic Perspectives. Liverpool: Deborah Charles Publications, 1995.
Jacquemet, M. Credibility in Court: Communicative practices in the Camorra trials. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.
Kaplan, Jeffrey P. "Syntax in the Interpretation of Legal Language: The Vested versus Contingent Distinction in Property Law." 68 Am. Speech 58 (1993).
Kettridge, Richard, and John Lehrberger. Sublanguage: Studies of Language in Restricted Semantic Domains. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1982.
Klinck, Dennis R. The Word of the Law: Approaches to Legal Discourse. Ottawa: Carlton University Press, 1992.
Kniffka, Hannes (ed.), Recent Developments in Forensic Linguistics
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996).
Kniffka, Hannes. Der Linguist als Gutachter bei Gericht, in G.
Peuser and S. Winter (eds.), Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft (Bonn:
Bouvier Verlag, 1981).
Komter, Martha L. Dilemmas in the Courtroom: A Study of Trials of Violent Crime in the Netherlands. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998.
Kurzon, Dennis. "Clarity and Word Order in Legislation." 5 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 269 (1985).
Kurzon, Dennis. It Is Hereby Performed: Explorations in Legal Speech Acts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1986.
Labov, William, and Wendell A. Harris. Addressing social issues through linguistic evidence, in Language and the law (John Gibbons ed.) 265 (London: Longman, 1994).
Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Talking Power: The Politics of Language. Basic Books, 1990.
Levi, Judith N. Language as evidence: the linguist as expert witness in North American courts. 1 Forensic Linguistics 26 (1994).
Levi, Judith N., and Anne Graffam Walker. Language in the Judicial Process. New York and London: Plenum Press, 1990.
Loftus, Elizabeth F., and John C. Palmer. "Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction between Language and Memory." 13 J. Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior 585 (1974).
Maley, Yon. "The Language of the Law." In Language and the Law, edited by John Gibbons, 11. London and New York: Longman, 1994.
Martineau, Robert J. Drafting Legislation and Rules in Plain English. St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Co., 1991.
Matoesian, Gregory M. Law and the Language of Identity: Discourse in the William Kennedy Smith Rape Trial. Oxford, University Press, 2001.
Matoesian, Gregory. Reproducing Rape: Domination through Talk in the Courtroom. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993.
Maynard, Douglas W. Inside Plea Bargaining: The Language of Negotiation. New York: Plenum Press, 1984.
McMenamin, Gerald. R. Forensic Stylistics. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1993.
Mellinkoff, David. Language of the Law. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963.
Mellinkoff, David. "The Language of the Uniform Commercial Code." 77 Yale L.J. 185 (1967).
Mertz, Elizabeth. The Language of Law
School: Learning to "Think Like a Lawyer" (Oxford: University Press,
2007).
Miller, Geoffrey. "Pragmatics and the Maxims of Interpretation." 5 Wis. L. Rev. 1179 (1990).
Morrison, Mary Jane. "Excursions into the Nature of Legal Language." 37 Clev. St. L. Rev. 271 (1989).
Nolan, Frances. The Phonetic Bases of Speaker Recognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
O'Barr, William M. Linguistic Evidence: Language, Power, and Strategy in the Courtroom. San Diego: Academic Press, 1982.
Philbrick, Frederick A. Language and the Law: The Semantics of Forensic English. New York: Macmillan, 1949.
Philips, Susan U. Ideology in the Language of Judges. Oxford, University Press, 1998.
Rieber, Robert and William Stewart (eds.). The language scientist as expert in the legal setting. New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 1990.
Robinson, Marlyn (ed.). Language and the Law: Proceedings of a Conference. William S. Hein & Co. 2003.
Schane, Sanford. "The Corporation Is a Person: The Language of a Legal Fiction." 61 Tulane L. Rev. 563 (1987).
Schauer, Frederick (ed). Law and Language. New York University Press, 1993.
Schwarzer, William W. "Communicating with Juries: Problems and Remedies." 69 Cal. L. Rev. 731 (1981).
Shuy, Roger W. The language of confession, interrogation and deception. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998.
Shuy, Roger W. Language Crimes: The Use and Abuse of Language Evidence in the Courtroom. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1993.
Shuy, Roger W. "Warning Labels: Language, Law, and Comprehensibility." 65 American Speech 291 (1990).
Singer, Norman J. Sutherland Statutory Construction. 5th ed. Deerfield, Ill.: Clark Boardman Callaghan, 1992.
Smith, Vicky L. When prior knowledge and law collide: Helping jurors use the law. 17 Law and Human Behavior 507(1993).
Solan, Lawrence M. Can the legal system use experts in meaning? 66 Tennessee Law Review 1167 (1999).
Solan, Lawrence M. The Language of Judges. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Lawrence M. Solan, Law, Language, and Lenity, 40 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 57 (1998).
Lawrence N. Solan. Learning Our Limits: The Decline of Textualism in Statutory Cases, 1997 Wis. L. Rev. 235.
Solan, Lawrence M. Refocusing the Burden of Proof In Criminal Cases: Some Doubt about Reasonable Doubt, 78 Texas L. Rev. 105 (1999).
Solan, Lawrence. "When Judges Use the Dictionary." 68 American Speech 50 (1993).
Solan, Lawrence M, and Peter M. Tiersma. Hearing Voices: Speaker Identification in American Courts, 54 Hastings Law Journal 373 (2003)
Solan, Lawrence M, and Peter M. Tiersma. Speaking of Crime: The Language of Criminal Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. To appear, 2005.
Sontag, Lorelei. Deciding Death: A Legal and Empirical Analysis of Penalty Phase Jury Instructions and Capital Decision-making. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1990.
Steinberg, Edwin R. Plain English: Principles and Practice. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991.
Stygall, Gail. Trial Language: Differential Discourse Processing and Discursive Formation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1994.
Tiersma, Peter M. "Dictionaries and Death: Do Capital Jurors Understand Mitigation?" 1995 Utah L. Rev. 1 (1995).
Tiersma, Peter M. "The Language of Perjury: 'Literal Truth,' Ambiguity, and the False Statement Requirement." 63 S. Cal. L. Rev. 373 (1990).
Tiersma, Peter M. The Language of Silence, 48 Rutgers Law Review 1 (1995).
Tiersma, Peter M. Legal Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Tiersma, Peter M. Linguistic issues in the law. 69 Language 113 (1993)
Tiersma, Peter M. A Message in a Bottle: Text, Autonomy, and Statutory Interpretation, 76 Tulane Law Review 431 (2001).
Tiersma, Peter M. Nonverbal Communication and the Freedom of "Speech". 1993 Wisconsin Law Review 1525.
Tiersma, Peter M. "Reforming the Language of Jury Instructions." 22 Hofstra L. Rev. 37 (1993).
Tiersma, Peter M. and Lawrence M. Solan. The Linguist on the Witness Stand: Forensic Linguistics in American Courts, 78 Language 221 (2002).
Tiersma, Peter M. and Lawrence M. Solan. Cops and Robbers: Selective Literalism in American Criminal Law, 38 Law and Society Review 229 (2004).
Walker, Anne Graffam. "Language at Work in the Law: The Customs, Conventions, and Appellate Consequences of Court Reporting." In Language in the Judicial Process, edited by Judith N. Levi and Anne Graffam Walker, 203. New York and London: Plenum Press, 1990.
Wallace, William D. The admissibility of expert testimony on the discourse analysis of recorded conversations. 38 University of Florida Law Review 69 (1986).
Walsh, Michael. Interactional styles in the courtroom. In J. Gibbons (ed.), Language and the Law 217 (Harlow: Longman, 1994).
Walter, Bettyruth. The Jury Summation as Speech Genre: An Ethnographic Study of What It Means to Those Who Use It. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1988.
Winter, Stephen L. "Transcendental Nonsense, Metaphoric Reasoning, and the Cognitive Stakes for Law." 137 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1105 (1989).
Woodbine, George E. "The Language of English Law." 18 Speculum 395 (1943).
Woodbury, Hanni. "The Strategic Use of Questions in Court." 48 Semiotica 197 (1984).
Wydick, Richard C. Plain English for Lawyers. 3d ed. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1994.