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Law and language

Law and language

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.

Law and language

The essays in this volume reflect several important and widely-discussed issues in legal theory. One set of issues may be characterized as legal hermeneutics, a consideration of the practices governing the retrieval and determination of meaning from legal lexts and in legal contexts. Related issues arise from the use of literature and literary criticism to enhance an understanding of law and from the study of legal rhetoric.

Special collections: East Asia

The Stanford East Asia Library holds robust special collections of rare Chinese, Japanese, and Korean materials. Learn more about our collections and how to access them, including procedures for using the reading room.

Chinese Studies

Chinese Studies

Classics

Stanford Libraries' Classics collections include print and online resources for the study of literature and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome, including Greek and Latin language, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology, and papyrology.