Lawrence M Solan
Biographic Data
| ID | 820553 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lawrence M Solan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lawrence M |
| FAMILY NAME | Solan |
| SIGNATURE | SOLAN L M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brooklyn Law School |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Corpus Linguistics as a Method of Legal Interpretation: Some Progress, Some Questions
The Interpretation of Legal Language
In everyday interactions, we do our best to resolve linguistic vagueness, ambiguity, and other indeterminacies contextually. When these problems arise in the interpretation of authoritative legal texts, by contrast, it is not abundantly clear what context is relevant, or even legitimate. This article discusses approaches that legal analysts take in resolving linguistic indeterminacy. The most basic principle is reliance on the “ordinary meaning” …
The language of fraud cases by Roger Shuy
Reviewed by: The language of fraud cases by Roger Shuy Lawrence M. Solan The language of fraud cases. By Roger Shuy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 301. ISBN 9780190270643. $99 (Hb). Most of Roger Shuy’s book, The language of fraud cases, describes cases in which S was involved as a linguistic expert, called by parties who were accused of some kind of fraud. Written in a journalistic style to engage readers from multiple disciplines…
Argumentation and Decision Making in Professional Practice
How is argumentation used in professional practice? As schools aim to ensure that students are college-and-career ready, classroom practices might be informed by argumentation in the professions. An analysis of evidence-based reasoning in 3 professions—engineering, law, and medicine—offers out-of-school perspectives on the practices and purposes of argumentation. In these fields, sound argumentation is crucial to successful real-world decision ma…
Identifying where people come from by how they speak: A methodological gap worth bridging. A rejoinder to Cambier-Langeveld
Remembering Peter Tiersma
I don't remember just when I first met Peter Tiersma, but it was some time in the early 1990s. I was still practising law at the time, and we met at a conference. Peter had already made the move from practice to academia in 1990 when he joined the faculty at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where he remained for 24 years, until his death on 13 April 2014
The Oxford handbook of language and law
Cops and Robbers: Selective Literalism in American Criminal Law
Police often ask people to consent to a search of their person or possessions. Many people agree to allow such searches because they interpret the officers' ostensible "requests" as indirect commands. Yet courts routinely interpret police utterances in this situation as requests. A similar issue arises in the context of custodial interrogation. People being interrogated are inclined to invoke their right to counsel in relatively indirect or tenta…
The Linguist on the Witness Stand: Forensic Linguistics in American Courts
It is becoming increasingly common for linguists to testify as expert witnesses in both civil and criminal trials. Often linguistic expertise is clearly helpful to the judge or jury. Based on published judicial opinions, from which we draw our data, it appears that courts have allowed linguists to testify on such issues as the probable origin of a speaker, the comprehensibility of a text, whether a particular defendant understood the Miranda warn…
Why Laws Work Pretty Well, but Not Great: Words and Rules in Legal Interpretation
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Un effet du principe C chez l’enfant francophone
We report a study that tests children’s knowledge of an effect of Principle C of the binding theory: In the adult grammar of English and French, coreference between a main clause object pronoun and a non-pronominal subject of a sentence-final temporal clause is permitted, whereas coreference between a subject pronoun and the subject of a temporal clause is blocked. In an act-out task, both French-speaking adults and children aged 3–7 were found t…
Linguistic experts as semantic tour guides
This article examines the phenomenon of linguists testifying as experts on meaning in legal disputes over the interpretation of statutes, contracts, transcripts of tape-recorded conversations, and other important legal texts before courts in the USA. It concludes that there is an important role for linguists in such cases – the role of the tour guide. It suggests that judges need not be concerned about linguists usurping the traditional roles of …
Plain Meaning and Hard Cases
If the language of a statute is plain, how can interpreting that statute create a hard case?And if a case is hard, how can recourse to the statutory language help resolve the case?This essay will explore the apparent paradoxes raised by these questions.In his recent book, The Language of Judges, Lawrence Solan, a lawyer first trained as a linguist, uses linguistics to critique a variety of opinions in which he believes the Supreme Court has erron…
When Judges Use the Dictionary
I HAVE A VAGUE MEMORY OF MISSPELLING view in elementary school and being told by my teacher to look it up in the dictionary. I couldn't find it. Unsympathetic as she was, the teacher eventually broke down and gave me the spelling. Her more or less religious attitude towards dictionaries was not lost on me, however. To the extent I was able, I regularly and obediently turned to the dictionary, which, often enough, taught me very little apart from …
Pronominal Reference: Child Language and the Theory of Grammar
1. An Approach to Language Acquisition.- 1.1. Language Acquisition Research and the Innateness Hypothesis.- 1.2. The Role of Experience.- 1.3. Hypothesis Formation and the Evaluation Metric.- 1.4. Implications for Language Acquisition Research.- Notes.- 2. Structural Restrictions on Pronominal Reference.- 2.1. The Domain of This Study.- 2.2. Structural Restrictions on Anaphora: A Brief History.- 2.3. Structural Restrictions on Anaphora: A Revisio…
The Linguist on the Witness Stand: Forensic Linguistics in American Courts
It is becoming increasingly common for linguists to testify as expert witnesses in both civil and criminal trials. Often linguistic expertise is clearly helpful to the judge or jury. Based on published judicial opinions, from which we draw our data, it appears that courts have allowed linguists to testify on such issues as the probable origin of a speaker, the comprehensibility of a text, whether a particular defendant understood the Miranda warn…
Plain Meaning and Hard Cases
If the language of a statute is plain, how can interpreting that statute create a hard case?And if a case is hard, how can recourse to the statutory language help resolve the case?This essay will explore the apparent paradoxes raised by these questions.In his recent book, The Language of Judges, Lawrence Solan, a lawyer first trained as a linguist, uses linguistics to critique a variety of opinions in which he believes the Supreme Court has erron…
When Judges Use the Dictionary
I HAVE A VAGUE MEMORY OF MISSPELLING view in elementary school and being told by my teacher to look it up in the dictionary. I couldn't find it. Unsympathetic as she was, the teacher eventually broke down and gave me the spelling. Her more or less religious attitude towards dictionaries was not lost on me, however. To the extent I was able, I regularly and obediently turned to the dictionary, which, often enough, taught me very little apart from …
The Interpretation of Legal Language
In everyday interactions, we do our best to resolve linguistic vagueness, ambiguity, and other indeterminacies contextually. When these problems arise in the interpretation of authoritative legal texts, by contrast, it is not abundantly clear what context is relevant, or even legitimate. This article discusses approaches that legal analysts take in resolving linguistic indeterminacy. The most basic principle is reliance on the “ordinary meaning” …
Argumentation and Decision Making in Professional Practice
How is argumentation used in professional practice? As schools aim to ensure that students are college-and-career ready, classroom practices might be informed by argumentation in the professions. An analysis of evidence-based reasoning in 3 professions—engineering, law, and medicine—offers out-of-school perspectives on the practices and purposes of argumentation. In these fields, sound argumentation is crucial to successful real-world decision ma…
Cops and Robbers: Selective Literalism in American Criminal Law
Police often ask people to consent to a search of their person or possessions. Many people agree to allow such searches because they interpret the officers' ostensible "requests" as indirect commands. Yet courts routinely interpret police utterances in this situation as requests. A similar issue arises in the context of custodial interrogation. People being interrogated are inclined to invoke their right to counsel in relatively indirect or tenta…
Pronominal Reference: Child Language and the Theory of Grammar
1. An Approach to Language Acquisition.- 1.1. Language Acquisition Research and the Innateness Hypothesis.- 1.2. The Role of Experience.- 1.3. Hypothesis Formation and the Evaluation Metric.- 1.4. Implications for Language Acquisition Research.- Notes.- 2. Structural Restrictions on Pronominal Reference.- 2.1. The Domain of This Study.- 2.2. Structural Restrictions on Anaphora: A Brief History.- 2.3. Structural Restrictions on Anaphora: A Revisio…
When Judges Use the Dictionary
I HAVE A VAGUE MEMORY OF MISSPELLING view in elementary school and being told by my teacher to look it up in the dictionary. I couldn't find it. Unsympathetic as she was, the teacher eventually broke down and gave me the spelling. Her more or less religious attitude towards dictionaries was not lost on me, however. To the extent I was able, I regularly and obediently turned to the dictionary, which, often enough, taught me very little apart from …
Plain Meaning and Hard Cases
If the language of a statute is plain, how can interpreting that statute create a hard case?And if a case is hard, how can recourse to the statutory language help resolve the case?This essay will explore the apparent paradoxes raised by these questions.In his recent book, The Language of Judges, Lawrence Solan, a lawyer first trained as a linguist, uses linguistics to critique a variety of opinions in which he believes the Supreme Court has erron…
Linguistic experts as semantic tour guides
This article examines the phenomenon of linguists testifying as experts on meaning in legal disputes over the interpretation of statutes, contracts, transcripts of tape-recorded conversations, and other important legal texts before courts in the USA. It concludes that there is an important role for linguists in such cases – the role of the tour guide. It suggests that judges need not be concerned about linguists usurping the traditional roles of …
Un effet du principe C chez l’enfant francophone
We report a study that tests children’s knowledge of an effect of Principle C of the binding theory: In the adult grammar of English and French, coreference between a main clause object pronoun and a non-pronominal subject of a sentence-final temporal clause is permitted, whereas coreference between a subject pronoun and the subject of a temporal clause is blocked. In an act-out task, both French-speaking adults and children aged 3–7 were found t…
Why Laws Work Pretty Well, but Not Great: Words and Rules in Legal Interpretation
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Linguist on the Witness Stand: Forensic Linguistics in American Courts
It is becoming increasingly common for linguists to testify as expert witnesses in both civil and criminal trials. Often linguistic expertise is clearly helpful to the judge or jury. Based on published judicial opinions, from which we draw our data, it appears that courts have allowed linguists to testify on such issues as the probable origin of a speaker, the comprehensibility of a text, whether a particular defendant understood the Miranda warn…
Cops and Robbers: Selective Literalism in American Criminal Law
Police often ask people to consent to a search of their person or possessions. Many people agree to allow such searches because they interpret the officers' ostensible "requests" as indirect commands. Yet courts routinely interpret police utterances in this situation as requests. A similar issue arises in the context of custodial interrogation. People being interrogated are inclined to invoke their right to counsel in relatively indirect or tenta…
The Oxford handbook of language and law
Identifying where people come from by how they speak: A methodological gap worth bridging. A rejoinder to Cambier-Langeveld
Remembering Peter Tiersma
I don't remember just when I first met Peter Tiersma, but it was some time in the early 1990s. I was still practising law at the time, and we met at a conference. Peter had already made the move from practice to academia in 1990 when he joined the faculty at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where he remained for 24 years, until his death on 13 April 2014
The language of fraud cases by Roger Shuy
Reviewed by: The language of fraud cases by Roger Shuy Lawrence M. Solan The language of fraud cases. By Roger Shuy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 301. ISBN 9780190270643. $99 (Hb). Most of Roger Shuy’s book, The language of fraud cases, describes cases in which S was involved as a linguistic expert, called by parties who were accused of some kind of fraud. Written in a journalistic style to engage readers from multiple disciplines…
Argumentation and Decision Making in Professional Practice
How is argumentation used in professional practice? As schools aim to ensure that students are college-and-career ready, classroom practices might be informed by argumentation in the professions. An analysis of evidence-based reasoning in 3 professions—engineering, law, and medicine—offers out-of-school perspectives on the practices and purposes of argumentation. In these fields, sound argumentation is crucial to successful real-world decision ma…
The Interpretation of Legal Language
In everyday interactions, we do our best to resolve linguistic vagueness, ambiguity, and other indeterminacies contextually. When these problems arise in the interpretation of authoritative legal texts, by contrast, it is not abundantly clear what context is relevant, or even legitimate. This article discusses approaches that legal analysts take in resolving linguistic indeterminacy. The most basic principle is reliance on the “ordinary meaning” …
Corpus Linguistics as a Method of Legal Interpretation: Some Progress, Some Questions
Linguistics (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Legal Language and Interpretation (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Law in Society and Culture (5 works)