This bibliography contains some of the more important books on language and law.  The list uses both legal and linguistic citation formats, but there should be enough information in all cases to find any relevant source.


Articles are not included because the list would become too long.  For a good listing that includes articles, go to the IAFL website.

Entries are in alphabetical order.

If you know of other books (not articles!) that should be included, especially materials not in English, please send the relevant information to Peter.Tiersma@lls.edu

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Adler, Mark.  Clarity for Lawyers.  London: Law Society.  2nd ed., 2007.

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.

Baldwin, J. & P. French.   Forensic Phonetics.  (London: Pinter, 1990).

Bennett, W.L. & M.S. Feldman, Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom. London: Tavistock Publications (1981).

Berk‑Seligson, Susan.  The Bilingual Courtroom Court Interpreters in the Judicial Process (1990).

Bhatia, Vijay, Christopher Candlin, Maurizio Gott (eds), Legal Discourse in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts: Arbitration Texts in Europe, Peter Lang, Berna, 2003.
 
Bhatia, Vijay K., Jan Engberg, Maurizio Gotti, Dorothee Heller (eds) Vagueness in Normative Texts. Bern: Peter Lang, 2005.

Bix, Brian.  Law, Language, and Legal Determinacy.  Oxford: Clarendon.  1993.

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.

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. (ed.)  Language in the legal process.  Hampshire, U.K.:  Palgrave, 2002.

Cotterill, Janet.  Language and Power in Court : A Linguistic Analysis of the O.J. Simpson Trial.  Houndmills: Plagrave.  2003.

Cotterill, Janet. (ed.)  The Language of Sexual Crime.  Houndmills: Palgrave.  2007.

Coulthard, Malcolm, and Alison Johnson.  An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence.  Routledge, 2007.

Crystal, David, and Derek Davy. Investigating English Style. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969.

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).

Eades, Diana (ed.).  Language in Evidence: Linguistic and Legal Perspectives in Multicultural Australia. (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995).

Eades, Diana. Courtroom Talk and Neocolonial Control.  Berlin: DeGruyter, 2008. 

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.

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.

Garner, Bryan A. A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Garner, Bryan (ed.).  Black's Law Dictionary (various editions).

Gibbons, John.  Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language in the Justice System.  Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1994. 

Gibbons, John. Language and the Law. London and New York: Longman, 1994.

Gibbons, John, et al. Language in the Law.  New Delhi: Orient Longman.  2004.

Goodrich, Peter. Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks. London: Weidenfeld, 1990.

Goodrich, Peter.  Legal Discourse. London: Macmillan, 1987.

Grewendorf, Günther & Monika Rathert (eds.): Formal Linguistics and Law. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter (Series Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs (TiLSM) (to appear 2008)).

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.

Jackson, Bernard S.  Semiotics and Legal Theory.  London: Routledge, 1985.

Jacquemet, M.  Credibility in Court: Communicative practices in the Camorra trials. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Klinck, Dennis R. The Word of the Law: Approaches to Legal Discourse. Ottawa: Carlton University Press, 1992.

Kniffka, Hannes.  Working in Language and Law. A German Perspective (Palgrave McMillan, 2007).

Kniffka, Hannes (ed.), Recent Developments in Forensic Linguistics (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996).

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. It Is Hereby Performed: Explorations in Legal Speech Acts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1986.

Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Talking Power: The Politics of Language.  Basic Books, 1990.

Levi, Judith N., and Anne Graffam Walker. Language in the Judicial Process. New York and London: Plenum Press, 1990.

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.

Mattila, Heikki E.S.   Comparative Legal Linguistics.  Aldershot: Ashgate.  2006.

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.

Mertz, Elizabeth.  The Language of Law School: Learning to "Think Like a Lawyer" (Oxford: University Press, 2007).

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.

Olsson, John.  Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language, Crime and Law.  London: Continuum.  2004.

Orts-Llopis, Maria de los Angeles.  Approximacion al Discurso Juridico en Ingles.  Madrid: Edisofer.  2006.

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.

Rathert, Monika: Sprache und Recht. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 100 pages. (Series Kurze Einführungen in die Germanistische Linguistik, 2006).

Richland, Justin B.  Arguing with Tradition: The Language of Law in Hopi Tribal Court.  Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2008. 

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.  Language and the Law.  London: Continuum.  2006.

Schauer, Frederick (ed).  Law and Language.  New York University Press, 1993.

Shuy, Roger W. Creating Language Crimes.  Oxford: University Press.  2005.

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.  Linguistic Battles in Trademark Disputes.  Houndmills: Palgrave.  2002.

Siegel, Jeff, John Lynch, and Diana Eades. 

Singer, Norman J. Sutherland Statutory Construction. 5th ed. Deerfield, Ill.: Clark Boardman Callaghan, 1992.

Solan, Lawrence M. The Language of Judges. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Solan, Lawrence M, and Peter M. Tiersma.  Speaking of Crime: The Language of Criminal Justice.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005.

Steinberg, Edwin R. (ed.).  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.  Legal Language.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Wagner, Anne, Sophie Cacciaguidi-Fahy.  Obscurity and Clarity in the Law: Prospects and Challenges (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2008).

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.  A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life and Mind.  Chicago: University Press.  2001.

Wydick, Richard C. Plain English for Lawyers. 3d ed. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1994.

Yankova, Diana.  Statutory Provisions in English and Bulgarian.  Sofia: Tip-Top Press.  2004.