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The Language of Judges
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Since many legal disputes are battles over the meaning of a statute, contract, testimony, or the Constitution, judges must interpret language in order to decide why one proposed meaning overrides another. And in making their decisions about meaning appear authoritative and fair, judges often write about the nature of linguistic interpretation. In the first book to examine the linguistic analysis of law, Lawrence M. Solan shows that judges sometimes inaccurately portray the way we use language, creating inconsistencies in their decisions and threatening the fairness of the judicial system.
Solan uses a wealth of examples to illustrate the way linguistics enters the process of judicial decision making: a death penalty case that the Supreme Court decided by analyzing the use of adjectives in a jury instruction; criminal cases whose outcomes depend on the Supreme Court's analysis of the relationship between adverbs and prepositional phrases; and cases focused on the meaning of certain words in the Constitution. Solan finds that judges often describe our use of language poorly because there is no clear relationship between the principles of linguistics and the jurisprudential goals that the judge wishes to promote.
A major contribution to the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on law and its social and cultural context, Solan's lucid, engaging book is equally accessible to linguists, lawyers, philosophers, anthropologists, literary theorists, and political scientists.
Solan uses a wealth of examples to illustrate the way linguistics enters the process of judicial decision making: a death penalty case that the Supreme Court decided by analyzing the use of adjectives in a jury instruction; criminal cases whose outcomes depend on the Supreme Court's analysis of the relationship between adverbs and prepositional phrases; and cases focused on the meaning of certain words in the Constitution. Solan finds that judges often describe our use of language poorly because there is no clear relationship between the principles of linguistics and the jurisprudential goals that the judge wishes to promote.
A major contribution to the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on law and its social and cultural context, Solan's lucid, engaging book is equally accessible to linguists, lawyers, philosophers, anthropologists, literary theorists, and political scientists.
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Reviews for The Language of Judges
Rating: 4.75 out of 5 stars
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Intriguing overview of the employment of linguistic justifications by judges to explain their decisions. Solan's take is grounded in legal realism: Judges pretend that language demands a particular outcome, when if fact that is rarely the case (as shown the existence of dissenting opinions). Instead, judges have reached a decision on some other basis, perhaps equity, and then root around for a convincing rationale to convince the public that theirs was the correct outcome.When describing the linguistic explanations themselves, Solan's perspective is predominantly analytic, whereby syntax is reduced to symbolic relationships and conclusions obtained through contemplating those formulae. While a valid tradition, this approach demphasizes the natural use of language, which may seem the more obvious way to view the language. I disagreed with several of his preferred readings on what were the more natural readings of contested phrases. None of this detracts from his major arguments. Indeed, it tends to support them: language can only rule out readings, but provides little guidance when choosing between equally valid interpretations. Judges' confident assertions to the contrary.
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The Language of Judges - Lawrence M. Solan
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