Douglas Kibbee's Language and the law: Linguistic inequality in America and Roger Shuy's The language of fraud cases offer two very different perspectives on language and the law. While Kibbee focuses on legal rights and issues relating to membership in linguistically marked groups, Shuy presents examples of criminal cases in which language itself serves as evidence. To address these perspectives, the two books draw on very different sources. Kibbee offers an extensively researched account of a number of core areas of language policy in the United States, drawing on primary sources spanning all three branches of government, from legislation to case law to executive orders, as well as legal theory and the Constitution. Shuy draws primarily on his four decades of experience serving as an expert witness and examines several examples of interactional data. This leads to a marked stylistic difference between the two books: whereas Kibbee's book is densely packed and heavily footnoted, offering a level of detail that scholars and other expert readers will certainly appreciate, Shuy's is written in a more narrative style that would likely be accessible as an introduction to forensic linguistics for undergraduate students with little prior knowledge of the subject area.

Both volumes begin by providing some of the legal background for issues that recur throughout later chapters. In his first chapter, Kibbee outlines a framework for understanding the nature of antidiscrimination law in the United States, examining a ‘hierarchy of rights’ (5) that leads to significant legal distinctions between, for example, speakers of indigenous languages and immigrants. Kibbee further explains how the protection of such rights depends to a large extent on being able to link language to membership in a class based on religion, race, color, national origin, or gender. In examining the five-part test used to determine whether a group constitutes one of these ‘suspect classes’, the author explores some of the challenges that language presents as a marker of group identity. In doing so, Kibbee also introduces the distinction between discriminatory intent and disparate impact. As we see throughout the book, this concept has significant implications for determining whether or not a measure or policy constitutes discrimination.

In the chapters that follow, Kibbee examines the interplay between language and rights related to voting, due process, education, access to government information and services, and workplace communication. Each chapter takes a chronological approach, tracing the development of this relationship over time and showing both continuities and discontinuities in language policy, particularly in response to new waves of immigration or changes in the political landscape. This is perhaps most striking in chapter 4, the longest in the volume, which illustrates how policies regarding immigrant languages in education have swung from maintenance and promotion, such as Pennsylvania's School Law of 1837 approving bilingual German-English schools, to segregation and suppression, such as a 1918 declaration by the governor of Iowa establishing English as not only the sole medium of instruction in public schools but also ‘the sole means of communication in public places, on trains and on the telephone’ (95). While legal issues related to languages of immigration are a major focus of the book, Kibbee also considers legal issues related to indigenous languages; varieties of English that are associated with particular racial, gender, or sexual identities; and the use of English as an additional language. These issues include both ways in which speakers are actively singled out for negative treatment based on group membership, as well as ways in which negative impacts can arise from a lack of specialized resources for groups that need them.

In his final chapter, Kibbee makes a convincing case for the need to take linguistic inequality into account in considering philosophical notions of equality, liberty, and justice. Kibbee concludes the book by showing how the linguistic concerns introduced in the preceding chapters both challenge and enrich traditional philosophical perspectives on inequality. Summarizing one of his main points, Kibbee argues:

While Kibbee's point is hard to dispute, particularly in the US and in the additional cases from Western Europe that he mentions, the extension of this conclusion to all other societies merits some scrutiny. In places where multilingualism has long been the norm, such as parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, the notion of nativeness may be less straightforward, for example. In many such contexts, the inability to use more than one language may place an individual at more of a disadvantage than the inability to use one's native language. Reframed in this way, fostering equality would mean developing the multilingual (or plurilingual or translingual, depending on your preferred model) competence of all citizens. The issues that Kibbee highlights in the US thus offer rich insights for considering other contexts.

Shuy, writing with both linguists and legal professionals in mind, begins his book by defining key terms for practitioners from both fields. The linguistic background includes basic definitions of the concepts that form the organizational framework for each of the chapters that follow, specifically speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, and conversational strategies, which readers familiar with Shuy's other titles in this series will quickly recognize. The legal background provided for linguists emphasizes definitions of fraud as well as some of the adverbial modifiers commonly associated with it in US law, particularly ‘knowingly’ and ‘willfully’ (13), but also others such as ‘surreptitiously’ (22) and ‘without belief in the truth of what is said and done’ (23). Shuy returns to this definition of ‘fraudulent language’ (11) throughout the chapters that follow.

While not all of the cases in the book deal directly with the legal definition of fraud, Shuy describes the common thread among the chapters as the illustration of how ‘linguistic analysis can be used to help determine whether or not illegal fraudulent language was used and how it was believed to have been used’ (23). In the chapters that follow, however, which address cases ranging from an alleged violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to economic espionage to price fixing, the linguistic evidence often relates more closely to determining whether or not the defendant understood that an illegal act was taking place and whether the defendant willfully agreed to participate in this act if so. As a result, the linguistic analysis focuses less on determining whether the language itself was fraudulent and more on determining whether it provides evidence of criminal intent. With the exception of the modifiers ‘knowingly and ‘willfully’, which could be applied to a wide range of crimes beyond fraud, the other modifiers introduced at the beginning of the book seem less relevant to the linguist's work in such an analysis.

Throughout the book, Shuy ends several chapters by returning to the list of adverbial modifiers from the first chapter in order to assess whether or not fraudulent language was used. In these sections, Shuy frequently argues that the language used by the government agents or cooperating witnesses exhibits more features of fraudulent language than that of the defendant. For example, in chapter 4, on the Corrupt Foreign Practices Act, he states:

To a casual reader, this might suggest that the agents should be charged with fraud in order for justice to be done, but this is part of why the focus on fraudulent language is potentially misleading. The defendant himself is not being charged with fraud in this case, and the agents’ willful misrepresentations were part of a government sting operation rather than punishable misconduct. Language that exhibits the characteristics of fraudulent language does not necessarily imply legal liability, so readers should be wary of equating fraudulent language with fraud.

Despite their different foci, both books show how language can provide unique insights into legal issues. They both also offer linguists a better understanding of the legal context in which language use is embedded. Readers interested in social justice and linguistic rights will find Kibbee's Language and the law to be a valuable resource for understanding how these rights have changed over time. Likewise, readers interested in getting a taste of the work of a forensic linguist will learn much from Shuy's approach to communicating linguistic insights to legal audiences in a way that is clear and approachable. The two volumes together illustrate the wide range of ways that linguists are contributing to language and the law.