Abstract
In this book, Heffer, Rock and Conley provide a unique perspective on communication between legal professionals and the various groups and persons that they encounter in their work, by paying special attention to the transformation and ‘travel’ of texts as part of that communication. The three editors, joining their different backgrounds and expertise in language and law, combine a range of interesting perspectives on legal–lay communication. By this term, we refer here to those nodes of interaction where the legal world meets the everyday life world; this may involve people acting for the legal system – from police call-handlers to judges – as well as people encountering the legal process in a lay role, for example, as witnesses and suspects.
The theoretical nexus for the exploration in the individual chapters is the notion of ‘textual travel’, a portmanteau term for a series of concepts that are well established within linguistics, anthropology and sociology, and which are discussed using such terms as entextualization, decontextualization, recontextualization, intertextuality, interdiscursivity and textual trajectories (pp. 8–14). Collectively, notions of textual travel shed new light on the ways in which texts can be transformed in social and legal life. Considering that ‘to talk of texts “travelling” is to assume that there is a stable element to texts […] and that there is some fluid element’ (p. 11), the book explores the wide range of texts and contexts involved in legal–lay communication: from varied legal sources (legislation, common law, regulations) to different lay audiences (defendants, witnesses, juries), and from possible lay producers (eyewitnesses, clients, lay litigants) to hypothetical legal addressees (interviewing officers, lawyers, judges). The complexity of this travel is underscored by the diversity in procedures, technologies and media involved, from talk and writing to email, telephone conversations and the World Wide Web.
The potential for participants in legal processes ‘to appropriate mediational means and to transform texts through intertextual processes’ (p. 14) is the main concern in the Introduction of the volume, where textual mediation in policing settings is examined. Part 1 explores processes of mediation (through technologies, interactions and the media) as found in the investigatory stages of the legal process: vivid examples of intertextual construction in the criminal courtroom are presented here. Part 2 focuses on the importance of intertextuality in the legal construction of cases in court. Part 3 considers the transformative effects of recontextualization in processes of judicial decision-making. Finally, Part 4 explores how the apparent permanence of legal categorization is shaken by these processes of textual travel.
If the introductory chapter anticipates the main issues of the volume (namely, ‘legal-lay’ or ‘lay-legal’, together with the fundamental issue of ‘textual travel’), Chapters 2 to 4 in Part 1 each offer perspectives on how textual mediation is part of police work: Garner and Jonson’s chapter focuses on the micro-communicative events which often initiate investigations (e.g. emergency calls) and do so by mediating information from the public into the police institutions; Heydon’s chapter develops the theme of mediation through the police interview; Rock’s contribution considers how lay people’s language is mediated by policing processes.
The chapters in Part 2 deal with the ways in which legal professionals – lawyers and judges – construct their respective cases and decisions. In Chapter 5, Maryns highlights the link between spoken and written discourses in Belgian criminal trials. Chapter 6, by Komter, aims at illustrating the process of producing a written version of a suspect’s statement, perfectly complementing Maryns’ methodology. Jonhson’s contribution in Chapter 7 chooses a famous English criminal case to analyse how the defendant’s narrative was embedded and evaluated in the prosecution’s case. The final chapter in Part 2 is Archer’s study of the 1856 Palmer Trial, the so-called ‘trial of the century’: some of the practices present in this popular case are still prominent in criminal trials.
Chapters 9 and 10 in Part 3, respectively by Ehrlich and Heffer, argue that the reentextualization of texts within a new legal focus may obscure their original context, as happens to the complainant in the Maouloud Baby versus State of Maryland case discussed by Ehrlich. Tracy and Delgadillo (Chapter 11), on the other hand, show that the degree to which the legal process is ‘lay’ or ‘legal’ in style depends as much on the speaker’s argument as on the particular legal genre.
The theme for the final Part of the volume is the way in which the travels of texts can elide the cultural and ideological boundaries between categories in lay-legal communication, and even change the content of those categories. Chapter 12, by Conley and several medical colleagues, addresses the travels of texts in the highly regulated domain of genetic research; the following chapter, by Davies, examines the UK Highway Code; the last chapter contains Trinch’s analysis of Latina women’s reports of rape in interviews with legal authorities.
Necessarily complex, Legal–Lay Communication skilfully melds together perspectives from the areas of discourse studies, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics, still remaining accessible throughout to readers new to such fields. Written by a group of eminent international scholars, this work should rightly be seen as a significant contribution to a growing literature in Legal English discourse. As the Editors maintain in their Introduction, this book ‘can enrich our understanding of the socially imperative matter of communication between legal actors and those they investigate, represent, and sentence’ (p. 28). This volume will prove a profitable read for scholars from the diverse range of disciplines from which it draws upon and is therefore highly recommended to students and researchers in forensic linguistics, as well as sociolinguists, anthropologists, and discourse and communication scholars interested in the relation between language and the law.