Call For Chapters: Communication and Legal Practice

 From Susan Heinzelman, University of Texas, Austin:

Call for Chapters: Communication and Legal Practice

Editors:

Dr Tatiana Grieshofer, Reader in Language and Law, Birmingham City University, tatiana.grieshofer@bcu.ac.uk

Dr Kate Haworth, Senior Lecturer, Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, Aston University, k.haworth@aston.ac.uk

 

We are seeking submissions for an edited collection on Communication and Legal Practice, intended to be submitted to Cambridge University Press. At this stage, we are inviting submissions of abstracts on any aspect related to communication and legal practice with a direct link to legal processes and procedures. The selected abstracts will be included in the proposal for the edited collection. Upon the acceptance of the proposal by the Cambridge University Press, the authors will be invited to write the chapters for the edited collection. The publication schedule is as follows:

 

28th February 2023 – submission of 250-word abstracts by email to tatiana.grieshofer@bcu.ac.uk

31st May 2023 – editorial decision communicated to authors

31st December 2023 – submission of 6,000-word chapters, including the bibliography

31st March 2024 – feedback communicated to authors

30th June 2024 – final submission of chapters

 

Please find more information about the proposed edited collection below:

 

Communication and Legal Practice

 

The edited collection focuses on the currently underexplored yet crucial research area on the interface of communication and legal practice. It presents the state-of-the-art research in applied linguistics directly relevant to procedural and administrative law and practice, with an emphasis on how legal procedure is constructed, negotiated and implemented through language. What is unique about the collection is its focus on the applied aspects of linguistic theory, methodology and implementation in the context of legal practice. The collection covers different aspects of communication in its widest sense: interpersonal and institutional; written and spoken; communication processes involved in elicitation, comprehension and formulation of arguments; communication at the heart of negotiation, mediation, decision-making and legal reasoning; communication throughout different stages of legal proceedings.

 

The chapters in the collection will thus relate diverse communicative aspects to legal practice, focusing specifically on procedural aspects of criminal proceedings, non-criminal proceedings (family, civil, tribunal proceedings) and judicial decision-making. The selling point of the edited collection is that it will showcase methodological approaches from linguistics which can enrich legal reforms and procedural change as well as promote ground-breaking interdisciplinary research.

 

This volume goes beyond the current published work on related topics (courtroom discourse, language and law, forensic linguistics) in its broad conceptualisation of communication, direct applicability to day-to-day legal practice, clear link to procedural aspects, and methodological interdisciplinarity. A unique strength of this collection is its foregrounding of the institutional and procedural, which tends to be backgrounded to the linguistic focus in much of the current literature. This collection will therefore find an audience with legal academics and professionals, as well as linguists, social scientists and critical theorists across a range of disciplines.