Case Studies in Law and Language
Summary:
As the strong legal realist distinction between law-in-action and law-on-the-books encounters critique, sociolegal scholarship has come to explore ways in which uses of legal language, which involve practices or activities of speaking and writing, themselves constitute law in action. Through archival, field, or ethnographic research, the papers on this panel offer their own analyses of particular sites or situations, while together suggesting how attending to the language of law may reorient conventional approaches to law.
Chair/Discussant:
Ari Bryen (West Virginia University)
Participants:
An Appealing Practice: On Legal Forms, Writing Acts, and Making Law
*Alyse Bertenthal (University of California, Irvine)
Perpetuity: On the Intertextual Time- Space of Law’s Authority
*Justin Richland (University of Chicago)
The Unwritten: What’s Law and Language Got to Do With It?
*Marianne Constable (University of California, Berkeley)
The Vital Role of Imagined Jurors in the Age of the Vanishing Trial
*Anna Offit (Princeton University)