Lawyers spend vast amounts of time arguing about the meaning of words. Sometimes the disagreement may strike laypeople as bizarre: for example, in the United Kingdom you can get three years in prison for carrying around an ‘article’ for use in stealing something. The term ‘article’ does not include a trained monkey, according to the case of Daly v Cameron [1954] 1 All ER 315 (O'Connor Reference O'Connor2007: 192). Often, though, it is perfectly understandable for courts to deliberate at length about semantics: if someone takes some steps that might lead to stealing something, but does not actually steal anything, can they be charged with ‘attempting’ to steal? It would depend on how far advanced the steps were. If the suspect was caught tunnelling into a bank vault with a crowbar in their hand (perhaps without a trained monkey), and has a history of similar crimes, things would be fairly clear. At the other extreme, take someone with no criminal record or contacts, who speculates idly with friends about how to steal the Crown Jewels: they would probably have nothing to worry about. In between lies a wide range of behaviour that might count as an ‘attempt’, and it is often not easy for courts to decide where the dividing line should be drawn.

Language and the law are closely linked, and recent years have seen a surge of work on the connections. The editors of The Routledge handbook of forensic linguistics have been prominent in the field, and the result is an absorbing state-of-the-art survey. The book is divided into three sections. Section I has twenty-one chapters which examine ‘The language of the law and the legal process’, looking at written texts but mostly at spoken discourse in courtrooms and police stations. Section II, ‘The linguist as expert in legal processes’, reviews different ways in which linguists can apply specialist expertise to legal matters, including forensic phonetics, court interpreting, author identification, plagiarism and the widespread practice – highly dubious, in my view – of using linguistic analysis to determine language of origin in asylum cases. This section contains twelve chapters in all. Finally, Section III consists of five chapters which survey ‘New debates and new directions’.

Most of the book is concerned with criminal law – understandably, since crime is more dramatic than civil legal matters, and perhaps more fundamental. As the fictional barrister Rumpole says, ‘Crime is about life, death and the liberty of the subject; civil law is entirely concerned with that most tedious of all topics, money’ (Mortimer Reference Mortimer1988: 1). What civil and criminal law have in common, however, is a concern with things that we often prefer not to think about: conflict, bitterness, the sordid parts of life. The language of the law reflects this unpleasantness.

Where crime is concerned, the first section of the legal system to get involved is the police. Indeed, it would be fair to describe the police as the people who we pay to run towards – instead of away from – conflict and unpleasantness. The book under review looks at many features of linguistic interaction between the police and the public. In most democracies, when the police arrest someone they have to inform them of their right to silence. A chapter by Janet Ainsworth about the way in which these rights have been enshrined in law in the United States (‘Curtailing coercion in police interrogation: The failed promise of Miranda v. Arizona’) argues that the so-called Miranda rights have failed in reality to protect suspects from police coercion, partly for linguistic reasons. This point is taken up by the editors in the final chapter of the book, ‘Future directions in forensic linguistics’ (605–606); compare Cotterill Reference Cotterill2000 on similar problems in the United Kingdom. Incidentally, have you ever wondered why a common version of Miranda includes the words ‘anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law’? What is ‘can and will’ supposed to mean, and is it any different from ‘may’ in the British version ‘anything you do say may be given in evidence’? I only ask. (One might also suggest that the expression ‘given in evidence’ is an odd archaism, fossilised in 1912 by the Judges' Rules, see Sprack (Reference Sprack2006: 24); the Miranda expression ‘used against you in a court of law’ is, in my view, much better.)

The next stage in a crime investigation is the interview at the police station. In a chapter on lawyers' interventions during police questioning (‘“I advise you not to answer that question”: Conversation analysis, legal interaction and the analysis of lawyers’ turns in police interrogations of suspects'), Elizabeth Stokoe & Derek Edwards cite the following question by a police officer to a person arrested on suspicion of grievous bodily harm:

By saying ‘if you wish to do so’ in this extract, the officer is technically reminding the suspect of their right to silence. Nevertheless, in context this reminder is slimy, as is the rest of the police officer's question. If the suspect gives the obvious answer – words to the effect of ‘damage to the skull and possibly the brain’ – then this would be evidence of a criminal state of mind (mens rea) and might have serious consequences. Note also the chatty tone, with ‘I mean’ and ‘you know’ as informal fillers, and the invitation to ‘tell us your side o'the story’, as if this is all about balance and fair play. In fact, the question is not about ‘the story’ at all but asks the suspect to give an opinion on a hypothetical scenario. On the other hand, some people in police custody routinely tell lies, and do their best to be unhelpful in other ways. The police have an unpleasant job to do, and they have to obtain evidence that can be used in court. Nevertheless we have the right not to be bullied or manipulated by the police.

Once you have been arrested and charged with a crime (note that these are both illocutionary acts, just two of the many that are performed only in legal contexts – think of convicting, sentencing, taking the oath, and so on) eventually you may appear in court. The vast majority of criminal cases in the United Kingdom take place in the relatively undramatic venue of a magistrates' court, a point unfortunately not stressed in this book, which has no index entry for ‘magistrate’. Serious cases are tried in a Crown Court, where strict rules about who may speak and what they are allowed to say are enforced. Prosecuting lawyers are not allowed to testify themselves, but only to call witnesses and question them – usually in a way which brings out a narrative in which the defendant is guilty. Defending lawyers typically cross-examine these witnesses, in order to cast doubt on the accuracy and narrative coherence of their story; often they also construct an alternative narrative in which the defendant is innocent. Chris Heffer has a useful chapter on this in the book, entitled ‘Constructing crime stories in court’.

The strategies used by lawyers in cross-examination form one of the most interesting hubs of research in language and the law. Unfortunately there is no single chapter devoted to this topic, though several touch on it, notably Elizabeth Holt & Alison Johnson in ‘Socio-pragmatic aspects of legal talk: Police interviews and trial discourse’, Susan Ehrlich in ‘The discourse of rape trials’, Michelle Aldridge in ‘Vulnerable witnesses in the Criminal Justice System’, and Tatiana Tkačuková on ‘Cross-examination questioning: Lay people as cross-examiners’. There are also interesting chapters on closing speeches in court, pleas for leniency, and jury instructions (standardised words uttered by the judge just before the jury withdraws to consider its verdict). As Peter Tiersma shows in ‘Redrafting California's jury instructions’, juries have often struggled to comprehend what the judge says. Tiersma cites the odd use of stipulate in ‘statements of counsel are not evidence; however, if counsel have stipulated to a fact, accept that fact as having been conclusively proved’ (256); and the unusual word preponderate in ‘if the evidence is so evenly balanced that you are unable to say that the evidence on either side of an issue preponderates, your finding on that issue must be against the party who had the burden of proving it’ (257).

The written language of legal documents has also traditionally been difficult to understand, a matter dealt with in two excellent complementary chapters on legal writing, one by Vijay K. Bhatia on specificity (‘Specification in legislative writing: Accessibility, transparency, power and control’) and one by Gail Stygall on complexity (‘Complex documents/average and not-so-average readers’). Bhatia takes a 1904 law on selling alcoholic drinks, which has a single sentence consisting of 156 words, and shows that three different simplified versions are easier to read but less specific, leaving out crucial exceptions and qualifications. Stygall examines documents used to inform people of changes to their pension scheme or their credit card terms and conditions: the latter include an obscure reference to ‘any credits and payments that are applied against the balance of the transaction category on that day’ (57). She gives some relevant background on literacy levels in the United States, concluding pessimistically that plain English standards on their own are not enough to bridge the gap between legal documents and their readers.

Turning now to the section on the linguist as expert, several chapters carefully summarise the reliability of current work in areas such as speaker identification, authorship attribution and plagiarism. Alongside these are distressing warnings by two linguists with outstanding track records as expert witnesses. In ‘The expert linguist meets the adversarial system’, Lawrence M. Solan describes the unpleasant experience that can await linguists who testify in court, where the opposing lawyer will try to ‘rip him or her to shreds’ (396). In ‘Linguistics and terrorism cases’, Roger W. Shuy describes how anti-terrorism investigations in the United States ‘sometimes focus their efforts on uneducated, gullible … suspects, who are likely to be easier to catch and convict’ and who are often ‘newcomers to the country … with limited English’ (559). He describes in detail the 2008 case of Marwan El-Hindi, now serving fourteen years in prison for terrorism, and comments: ‘if the prosecutors had called on linguists to analyze these conversations [involving an undercover agent who pretended to be a recent convert to Islam] before the case went to trial, El-Hindi might never have been indicted’ (575).

One way to address these problems is discussed by Peter R. A. Gray, a senior Australian judge. In ‘Cross-cultural communication’, a nicely written chapter, he presents a different procedure that is used in some Australian courts. If each side wants to call an expert, the two of them confer beforehand and produce a joint document setting out the matters on which they agree, along with those where they do not agree and the reasons why. In court, the two experts are sworn in together after all other witnesses, and debate the areas of disagreement; only when they have concluded are the lawyers allowed to question them. Known as the ‘Hot Tub procedure’, it has the advantage of enabling scientific debate to take place separately from the more brutal process of cross-examination. This sounds like good practice which should be tried in other countries.

Staying with linguists as experts, a chapter by Deborah Cao looks at some of the key problems in ‘Translating legal language’, Krzysztof Kredens & Ruth Morris deal with interpreting outside the courtroom in ‘“A shattered mirror?”: Interpreting in legal contexts outside the courtroom’, Sandra Hale examines what happens in the courtroom in her contribution, ‘The need to raise the bar: Court interpreters as specialized experts’, and Fiona English looks at the fraught issue of ‘Assessing non-native speaking detainees’ English language proficiency'. Some of the problems these authors highlight come from widespread misconceptions about language in the general public. When judges tell court interpreters to render the ‘literal meaning’ of what is said and nothing more, as if that was a clear notion, or when police officers use language which a non-native English speaker might well struggle to understand, they are hardly unique – though where ‘life, death and the liberty of the subject’ are at stake, perhaps we should expect them to do better.

Excellent as this handbook is, it could have been even better. There are many crimes which can be committed purely by saying the wrong words. It would have been interesting to have a linguistic perspective on such offences as offering a bribe, conspiracy, incitement to racial and religious hatred, divulging official secrets, libel and blasphemy (which was, astonishingly, only abolished as a crime in the United Kingdom during the last decade). Free speech, where British law makes a problematic distinction between causing ‘offence’ (okay) and causing ‘harm’ (not okay) is another topic that could have been covered. Some contributions on language and legal reasoning might have persuaded more law professionals to take an interest. As studies such as Bench-Capon & Sartor (Reference Bench-Capon and Sartor2003) and Ellsworth (Reference Ellsworth, Holyoak and Morrison2005) have noted, there are many linguistic issues in the way that lawyers and judges attempt to justify their decisions. Legal textbooks such as Slapper & Kelly (Reference Slapper and Kelly2011) have lengthy sections on judicial reasoning, with the discussion of ‘statutory interpretation’ – how courts interpret the written law – raising difficult problems in semantics and pragmatics. Another missing area in this book is the interface between the philosophy of language and jurisprudence, as exemplified in Green (Reference Green2003) and Soames (Reference Soames and Soames2008) .

A brief final point: the term ‘forensic linguistics’ in the title of this book is not one that all specialists in this area like to use – ‘legal linguistics’, ‘language and the law’, ‘speech, language, and the law’ are others. None of them is ideal. One of the editors of the handbook, Malcolm Coulthard, can certainly lay claim to the title of ‘forensic linguist’. His analysis of alleged fabricated statements was crucial in rectifying some of the worst miscarriages of British justice in recent times, including the Bentley, Bridgewater and ‘Birmingham Six’ cases. Whether legal interpreting also comes under this heading, however, is doubtful. However, if the term ‘forensic linguistics’ helps to increase the academic and professional standing of the different fields represented in this book, I am all in favour of it.