This chapter focuses on the production of official records of police–suspect interviews in England & Wales, and the flaws in their current use as criminal evidence. It reveals the importance of the administrative processes undergone by an interviewee’s words post-interview, revealing how they shape – indeed, create – the resulting evidential product, especially through the institutional practice of summarising parts of the interaction. The journey from ‘live’ interaction in an interview room to an official evidential record is largely taken for granted within the legal system, with little-to-no internal or external scrutiny; this chapter argues that it should instead be recognised as a substantial contribution to – and transformation of – the resulting evidence, with all the dangers that potentially entails. Using data from the ‘For The Record’ project, including interview recordings and official police records alongside focus groups with practitioners, it demonstrates the importance for practitioners and researchers alike to pay closer attention to the format of the data they are examining, and to actively reflect on and seek out the many voices and actors which have shaped it.

This introductory chapter details the purpose of the collection and its structure. This collection 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. Covering the themes around legal process and legal profession through the lens of linguistics, the focus of this collection is very firmly on the applicability of linguistic theory and methodology to the context of legal practice. The Introduction also outlines the chapters, which draw on distinct methods and data types to explore diverse aspects of professional practice across a number of jurisdictions. In doing so, the chapter highlights the immense potential for incorporating linguistic insights into the legal process and the benefits it can bring to law researchers and practitioners.

The relationship between language(s) and economics is a complex one. While it has been commonly held that linguistic homogeneity favors economic prosperity, a counter-argument suggests that multilingual capabilities may remove impediments to such prosperity: economic advantages may flow from bridging linguistic divides. Languages in contact are rarely of equal status, however, and some “small” varieties are particularly threatened today – most often, of course, by English. In a renewed and ecologically based attention to at-risk languages, the matter of rights has become central. After all, sustained and broadly accepted arguments for inherent language rights could put both speakers and their interactions with other communities on a stronger footing. My thesis here is that any meaningful support for language rights must be firmly grounded in law. Currently, this is very rarely the case and, therefore, much of the discussion about rights is really about claims to rights.