This volume explores new interfaces between linguistics and jurisprudence. Its theoretical and
methodological importance lies in showing that many questions asked within the field of
language and law receive satisfactory answers from formal linguistics.The book starts with a
paper by the two editors in which they explain why the volume - as a whole and with its
individual papers - is an innovation in the field of language and law. In addition an overview
about the most important research projects on language and law is given. The first chapter of
the book is on understanding the law. Jurists and laypersons always ask for the precise meaning
of a certain piece of the law. In linguistics the discipline investigating 'meaning' is
semantics thus it is to be expected that semantics can contribute to a correct understanding
of the law. Chapter 1 also investigates the alleged incomprehensibility of legal language with
the help of psycholinguistics. Chapter 2 is on identifying the criminal. To find the author of
a blackmailer's letter text corpus linguistics is instrumental. If the blackmailer uses the
telephone instead of the letter speaker identification and phonetics are necessary. The BKA
stores all blackmailing letters in a database but databases are only one possibility of
organizing legal systems another possibility is the application of tools from computational
linguistics and artificial intelligence. These tools can be useful to handle terminology to
retrieve information or to model legal theorizing in a formal system. Chapter 3 demonstrates a
variety of examples of organizing legal systems. The topic of chapter 4 is multilingualism and
the law. The European legislation is a product of legal and linguistic diversity as the member
states do not only differ in languages but also in their legal systems. One paper shows how
Switzerland handles its multilingualism in legal drafting. The input of translation studies is
of course vital in this field of research. An index for both subjects and persons complements
the volume.
