International Journal of Language & Law (JLL)

The Recommended National Standards for Working with Interpreters in Australian Courts and Tribunals

Rocco Loiacono — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The second edition of the Recommended National Standards for Working with Interpreters in Australian Courts and Tribunals (Standards) was launched in April 2022, with the first edition published in late 2017. The Standards recognise the critical role that interpreters play in the administration of justice in courts and tribunals in Australia. This article reviews the development of the Standards, and gives an overview of the Standards and their importance in ensuring procedural fairness for those involved in the justice system with limited or no proficiency in English. The article also provides an overview of the implementation of the Standards by courts and tribunals in Australia.

Tweedledum and Guildenstern

Gabriel Lanyi — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

When political language invades the law and political statements masquerade as legal ones, provisions of the law acquire multiple meanings. For laws to be functional, their language must be denotative. Words must correlate with concrete elements of the real world as closely as possible, and actionable legal statements must either create reality or influence it outright. By contrast, political language is connotative. Words have a prospective one-to-many relation with reality, describing a desirable or promised state of affairs. Their influence on behavior is to inspire loyalty. The stack of associations that can be heaped on the back of the meaning of words varies. That pile is much smaller for words like equal, full, and exclusive, than, say, for lucky, dull, and elusive. The definition of the State of Israel as “Jewish and democratic,” which appears in three constitutional provisions, uses two connotative terms uncommonly rich in associations, which renders them legally dysfunctional. Joined together, they are like cheveril gloves that can quickly be turned inside out, making Jewish and democratic mean everything (an endless combination of terms open to interpretation) and nothing (out-and-out contradiction between the two) at the same time.

Cite as: Lanyi, JLL 12 (2023), F1‒F9, DOI: 10.14762/jll.2023.F01

The Whole Truth?

Luis López — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0200

The Supreme Court decision in Bronston v. United States asserts that a defendant can be charged with perjury only on the basis of what the defendant actually said, not on the basis of a truthful statement that may lead to a misleading interpretation. Robbins (2019) proposes to include misleading and incomplete testimony in the language of the U.S. federal perjury statute. Robbins claims that this addition would discourage sophisticated defendants from using misleading rhetoric to avoid telling the truth; he also claims that juries should have no difficulty identifying misleading statements. In this article, I explore the notions of ‘misleading statement’ and ‘omission’ to clearly delineate their semantic fields. I show that there are practical, as well as philosophical, difficulties in the changes to the perjury statute that Robbins proposes. Most importantly, the empirical work reported by Skoczeń (2021) shows that naïve subjects do not always agree in their interpretation of misleading statements and, even when they agree that a statement is misleading, they do not agree whether it should be regarded in the same category as a lie. These findings suggest that more work needs to be done in our understanding of linguistic interpretation before we are certain that we can predict the consequences of broadening the scope of the perjury statute.

On the Role of English in the post-Brexit European Union

Manfred Herbert — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0200

This paper examines the role of English in the post-Brexit EU through three lenses. From a legal perspective, the role of English has not been changed by Brexit. English remains one of the 24 Treaty languages, official languages and working languages in the EU. The removal of English, which could only be decided unanimously by the Council of the EU, has never been seriously considered. From an empirical perspective, there is evidence that English is the dominant working language in the EU institutions. In this respect, there are no indications of any change after Brexit, even if some call for a reduction in its primacy. From a moral perspective, Brexit should strengthen the role of English at the levels of working languages and transnational communication for two reasons: first, because English is an almost neutral language after Brexit, which significantly reduces injustices associated with its use during the UK’s EU membership, and second, because it can be expected that “Euro-English” will become even more autonomous and can be regarded as the Europeans’ own language.

Cite as: Herbert, JLL 12 (2023), 31–47, DOI: 10.14762/jll.2023.031

Solving the Cherry-Picking Problem in Legislative History Use

Brett Hashimoto, James Heilpern — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0200

The use of legislative histories under intentionalist/purposivist theories of statutory interpretation is frequently criticized because it can be easily biased (see, e.g., Scheppele, 2012). To date, corpus-based statutory interpretation has relied almost exclusively on textualist theory of legal interpretation. However, corpus linguistic methods are not necessarily bound to any one theory (e.g., Biber & Reppen, 2015). The present study analyses two legislative histories as corpora and compares them against a general corpus of English to determine if interpretative theory makes a meaningful difference in two example cases (Costello v. United States, 2012; Taniguchi v. Kan Saipan Pacific, 2012). Senses of relevant terms were manually annotated by two independent human coders with high interrater reliability in the two types of corpora. The results indicate that a legislative history corpus can reveal multiple patterns of lexical meaning and produce unbiased and distributional results rather than a single biased data point as most legislative history analyses do. These two case studies show significant and meaningful differences in both cases using Fisher’s Exact Test (Costello, p < 0.0001, Cramer’s V = 0.70; Taniguchi, p < 0.0001, Cramer’s V = 0.53) between using a legislative history corpus versus a general language corpus. These results indicate that intentionalist/purposivist methods can be improved by using corpus-based analyses as well as the fact that intentionalist/purposivist and textualist theories produce practical semantic distinctions in legal interpretive settings due to the differences in relevant texts, registers, and speech communities.

Legal Linguistics in Times of Language Models and Text Automation

Friedemann Vogel, Hanjo Hamann — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Some say that automated text creation has the potential to disrupt traditional legal employment models, as software may be able to perform certain tasks currently carried out by human professionals. We interrogate this perception in this editorial, calling upon fellow researchers to submit abstracts on this topic and related issues, in order to be developed into full papers for inclusion in JLL’s 2023 publication schedule. As the use of artificial intelligence and language models in the legal system continues to grow, it is important for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to carefully consider the implications of these technologies for the future of language and law. Or so they say.

Cite as: Vogel & Hamann, JLL 12 (2023), 1‒7, DOI: 10.14762/jll.2023.001