Current Legal Issues Volume 15: Law and Language

• Offers a broad overview of the interaction between law and language and the way they infuence each other
• The latest volume in the established Current Legal Issues series, which brings together scholars from around the world to explore the interactions between legal thought and other disciplines
• Topics include libel, linguistic meaning and truth in language and law, semantics, the power of naming, and role of language in constructing commercial contracts

Current Legal Issues, like its sister volume Current Legal Problems (now available in journal format), is based upon an annual colloquium held at University College London. Each year leading scholars from around the world gather to discuss the relationship between law and another discipline of thought. Each colloquium examines how the external discipline is conceived in legal thought and argument, how the law is pictured in that discipline, and analyses points of controversy in the use, and abuse, of extra-legal arguments within legal theory and practice.

Law and Language, the fifteenth volume in the Current Legal Issues series, offers an insight into the scholarship examining the relationship between language and the law. The issues examined in this book range from problems of interpretation and beyond this to the difficulties of legal translation, and further to non-verbal expression in a chapter tracing the use of sign language at the Old Bailey; it examines the role of language and the law in a variety of literary works, including Hamlet; and considers the interrelation between language and the law in a variety of contexts, including criminal law, contract law, family law, human rights law, and EU law.