In Representing rape, Ehrlich provides a detailed linguistic account of a sexual assault trial. The data for this study come from two sources: a university tribunal and a criminal trial in which complaints were brought against a single man, pseudonym Matt, on behalf of two women. While focusing in each chapter on particular linguistic details, Ehrlich traces their use across several contexts within the legal proceedings – direct testimony, cross-examination and the delivery of judgments. In doing so, the author shows how the details of language use feed into larger frameworks of meaning and legal practice.

Chap. 1, “The institutional coerciveness of legal discourse,” begins with a discussion of recent work in language and gender studies. Here Ehrlich argues for a constructivist, performative, and anti-essentialist concept of gender, drawing on the work of scholars within feminist linguistics and interactional sociolinguistics. She goes on to show the convergence between such work and notions of institutional coerciveness, suggesting that law and other institutions constrain and shape the practices through which gender is constructed. Drawing together early work on sexist language and gendered representations with more recent work on gendered practice, the author characterizes her task as one of exploring the “way that the linguistic representation of gender in the third person shapes the enactment of gender in the first person” (p. 10). In later chapters, this relationship is sometimes described in terms of subject positions that legal participants (defendant and complainants) come to occupy. In the later part of the first chapter, Ehrlich turns to consider legal discourse and the work of feminist legal scholars. Here we are introduced to an important distinction between law-as-practice and law-as-statute, which in many ways justifies the type of study provided here. “In spite of sweeping legislative reform to sexual assault and rape statutes, other aspects of sexual assault legal processes continue to be informed by culturally powerful interpretive frameworks that legitimate male violence and reproduce gendered inequalities” (22). Ehrlich's argument here is persuasive: Actual legal practice is underdetermined by statute, and, as such, an understanding of what is going on requires that the analyst attend to the situated activities (police investigations, interrogations, trials, lawyers consultations, jury deliberations, judge's decisions) that together constitute the practice of law.

In chap. 2, Ehrlich provides an analysis of the defendant's testimony, focusing on, as she puts it, his grammar of “non-agency.” This is a wonderfully detailed analysis in which Matt's use of particular grammatical constructions to mitigate, diffuse, obscure, and indeed eliminate his own agency is critiqued. Particularly important to Matt's strategy here are agentless passives (all our clothes at one point were taken off ) in which an agent is implicit but unrealized in the surface form of the sentence, and unaccusative constructions (The sexual activity started escalating even further) in which the agent is eliminated altogether. These unaccusative sentences frequently have grammatical subjects that are themselves nominalizations. Ehrlich writes, “As the subjects of unaccusative verbs, they depict their referents as spontaneous sexual events, as happenings that have taken their natural course without any particular cause or agent” (50). Later in the chapter, Ehrlich shows what might be considered a deviant case, in which Matt pushes the limits of contextual appropriateness by claiming that my shirt came off. Revealing an orientation to the very issues of agency and causation that Ehrlich analyzes, the lawyer follows up with when you say your shirt came off, how did your shirt come off? One of the real strengths of this chapter and of the book in general is the way in which the author traces the connections between testimony and the process of adjudication. In chap. 2, then, Ehrlich suggests that the judge's decision was informed by an interpretation of Matt's grammar of non-agency via what she calls “the male sexual drive discourse.” So with Matt's own agency effectively obscured or eliminated, the judge was able to locate the cause of the events in male hormones. Ehrlich provides the following quotation from the judgment: young women must realize that when a young man becomes aroused during sexual activity there is a danger that he will be driven by hormones rather than by conscience (57).

In chap. 3, the questions of lawyers and tribunal members are analyzed in terms of the “control” they exert (over witnesses' answers, the evidence presented, the ideological frame which they invoke), the presuppositions they carry, and the beliefs they convey. The analysis is certainly insightful, and the focus on the lawyer's presentation of “options” clearly illustrates the “utmost resistance standard” that Ehrlich is concerned to illuminate. However, the focus on single questions also obscures somewhat the place these turns occupy in a “line-of-questioning” (see Atkinson & Drew 1979). Moreover, the author suggests that presuppositions embedded in questions are difficult to deny, but the interactional issues implied here are not fully engaged. An alternative analysis of the same data might draw on the concepts of turn-design and preference. From this perspective, questions such as Ehrlich analyzes do not exert “control” but rather prefer certain answers. From the perspective of conversation analysis, such questions are built toward a type-conforming and confirming answer. The notions of preference and type-(non)-conformity might be employed to specify just what interactional work a dispreferred or non-type-conforming response entails for the witness. Sacks 1987 and more recent work by Raymond 2000 point the way here.

Chap. 4 analyzes the complainants' own expressions of agency focusing, as in chap. 2, on the grammatical constructions they employed in producing both direct and cross-examination testimony. Ehrlich is once again persuasive in making the case that, while lawyers attempt to portray complainants as ineffective, their own testimony draws on notions of fear so as to contest the dominant framework of the “utmost resistance standard.” “When they did represent themselves as initiators or causers of actions (i.e. as agents or actors) their causal role was severely diminished; otherwise they represented themselves as experiencers of cognitive or emotional states or as patients – entities that were acted upon” (97). Thus, when asked why they did not exercise some option which they are compelled, in the course of cross-examination, to recognize as an option, complainants suggest that in the context of sexual assault, it was their fear and drive toward self-preservation that caused them to act the way they did. Ehrlich here suggests that, against the liberal model of the rationally choosing and intending agent, complaints are drawing on a notion of action that attends much more to the situated particulars in which it is embedded. Here “what drives (i.e. causes) the women's actions is not the free will of an autonomous individual, but rather the strong emotions of fear, shock, and confusion engendered by Matt's sexual aggression” (113). Ehrlich once again follows these themes through the testimony and on to the adjudication. Rather than recognize the importance of self-preservation and the role that fear may have played in the sexual assault, the adjudicators characterize complainants as not sensible, ineffective, and even irrational.

In chap. 5, Ehrlich turns to consider these legal proceedings as a whole and argues that a notion of miscommunication underlies the adjudication process. She finds evidence in both the lawyers' questions and the judgments to suggest that sexual assault was understood to result from a failure on the part of the women to effectively communicate their rejection of Matt's advances. Matt then is cast in the role of one who simply misunderstood ambiguous signals. Ehrlich thus shows the ways in which theoretical models current in sociolinguistics converge with explanatory accounts offered within the context of the legal proceedings. The book ends with a short concluding chapter in which Ehrlich outlines the main theoretical arguments of the preceding chapters.

This is an excellent book which not only provides a highly original, persuasive, and detailed analysis of these particular legal proceedings, but at the same time offers an insightful application of feminist linguistics, socio-grammatical analysis, and critical discourse analysis. Seasoned scholars will find it a very valuable contribution to current theoretical debates in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. At the same time, given the clarity with which complex analyses and arguments are presented, the book would make an excellent addition to undergraduate or graduate courses on language and gender, language and law, language and power, or discourse analysis.