Discursive Constructions of Consent in the Legal Process

Edited by Susan Ehrlich, Professor of Linguistics, York University, Edited by Diana Eades, Adjunct Professor of Linguistics, University of New England (Australia), and Edited by Janet Ainsworth, Professor of Law, Seattle University

Susan Ehrlich is Professor of Linguistics at York University in Toronto.

Diana Eades is Adjunct Professor at University of New England.

Janet Ainsworth is the John D. Eshelman Professor of Law at Seattle University and Research Professor in the Research Center for Legal Translation at China University of Political Science and Law.

Janet Ainsworth is the John D. Eshelman Professor of Law at Seattle University, and was appointed Research Professor in the Research Center for Legal Translation, China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing. Prior to accepting a teaching position, she practiced law as a public defender, trying felony cases and pursuing criminal appeals. Her current research interests lie at the intersection of law, language, and culture.

Philipp Angermeyer is Associate Professor of Linguistics at York University in Toronto. His research investigates language contact and bi- and multilingual language use from a sociolinguistic perspective, in different spoken and written contexts, focusing on codeswitching and pragmatic aspects of interpreting. He is the author of Speak English or What? Codeswitching and Interpreter Use in New York City Courts (2015, Oxford).

Susan Berk-Seligson is Research Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Faculty Fellow, Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University. She is author of the award-winning book, The Bilingual Courtroom: Court Interpreters in the Judicial Process (1990, 2002, The University of Chicago Press) and Coerced Confessions: The Discourse of Bilingual Police Interrogations (2009, Mouton de Gruyter). Berk-Seligson is currently completing a book-length manuscript on justice systems in contact, focusing on the Quichua indigenous peoples of Ecuador.

Jean Cadigan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California at Los Angeles. Much of her work involves empirical studies on the ethical, legal, social, and policy implications of large-scale genomic research.

John M. Conley is William Rand Kenan, Jr. professor of Law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He holds an A.B. from Harvard and a J.D. and Ph.D. (Anthropology) from Duke. He has conducted ethnographic and linguistic studies of the informal justice system, institutional investing (both with William O'Barr), corporate social responsibility (with Cynthia Williams), corporate boards of directors (with Lissa Broome and Kimberly Krawiec), and, most recently, the emerging field of genetic medicine.

Arlene M Davis is an attorney and Associate Professor of Social Medicine, as well as core faculty in the Center for Bioethics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her work focuses on clinical and research ethics and draws upon her prior experience in private practice and in pediatric and public health nursing. Over the past 20 years, Arlene has been a member of a research ethics committee and a co-investigator on a series of research projects funded by the National Institutes for Health for the examination of the ethical, legal, and social implications of the human genome project.

Paul Dwyer is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Performance Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. In addition to his research collaboration with Michele Zappavigna and Jim Martin on multi-modal discourse analysis of restorative justice conferencing, Paul publishes on applied theatre practices in the fields of health, education, welfare and political activism. He is also a performance maker with extensive experience in documentary theatre, including several works based on transcripts from parliamentary inquiries, royal commissions, coronial inquests and other legal proceedings.

Diana Eades, an Adjunct Professor at the University of New England in Australia, is a critical sociolinguist whose main research examines communication with Australian Aboriginal speakers of English in the legal process. Her books include Courtroom Talk and Neocolonial Control (2008, Mouton de Gruyter) and Sociolinguistics and the Legal Process (2010, Multilingual Matters). She also applies sociolinguistic research in training lawyers and judicial officers, as expert witness, and as advisor to inquiries.

Helen Edwards is a Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Law School, Nottingham Trent University. She specialises in criminal law, evidence and advocacy. She is a barrister and maintains an associate tenancy at KCH Garden Square Chambers in Nottingham and Leicester. Helen is also a qualified mediator.

Derek Edwards is Emeritus Professor of Psychology in the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, England. His interests are in the analysis of language and social interaction in everyday and institutional settings. He specializes in discursive psychology, in which relations between psychological states and the external world are studied as discourse categories and practices, including accounts of actions, events and intentionality in legal settings. His books include Discursive Psychology (with Jonathan Potter) and Discourse and Cognition.

Susan Ehrlich is Professor of Linguistics at York University in Toronto. She has published in the areas of language, gender and sexuality; discourse analysis; and language and the law. Her books include Representing Rape (2001, Routledge), 'Why do you Ask': The Function of Questions in Institutional Discourse (2010, Oxford, co-edited with Alice Freed) and The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality (2014, Wiley Blackwell, co-edited with Miriam Meyerhoff and Janet Holmes).

Philip Gaines is Associate Professor of English (Language Studies) at Montana State University, USA. His research interests lie in the area of language and law. He has recently completed a manuscript on the discursive history of trial advocacy manuals and is at work on a new research project dealing with the structure of police interrogation discourse in cases leading to false confessions.

Guusje Jol is a PhD Candidate at the Center for Language Studies at Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen (the Netherlands). She has a degrees in both law and Dutch language and culture and she studies police interviews with child witnesses. Other research interests include institutional interaction and language in legal context.
J R Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focusing on English and Tagálog - with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics, forensic linguistics and social semiotics. Recent publications include Learning to Write, Reading to Learn (2012, Equinox); with Clare Painter and Len Unsworth, Reading Visual Narratives (2013, Equinox); and Systemic Functional Grammar: A Next Step into the Theory (2013, Higher Education Press, Beijing).

Lawrence M. Solan is the Don Forchelli Professor of Law and Director of the Center for the Study of Law, Language and Cognition at Brooklyn Law School. His books include The Language of Judges, Speaking of Crime (with Peter Tiersma), The Language of Statutes: Laws and their Interpretation, and The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law (co-edited with Peter Tiersma). Solan has been a visiting professor at the Yale Law School, and in the Psychology Department and Humanities Council at Princeton University.

Elizabeth Stokoe is Professor of Social Interaction in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University UK. She has published extensively her analyses of interaction in settings including police interrogation, commercial sales calls, and inquiries to mediation and other services. She has also studied the implications of role-played or simulated interaction for communication training, and developed a pioneering alternative based in conversation analysis. She is the author of Discourse and Identity (2006, with Bethan Benwell) and editor of Conversation and Gender (2011, with Susan Speer).

Frances Rock is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University. Her work investigates the mediation of experiences in social worlds. Frances' research examines language and policing, workplaces and ecolinguistic topics. Frances' publications include the monograph Communicating Rights: The Language of Arrest and Detention (2007) and the co-edited collection Legal-Lay Communication: Textual Travels in the Law (2013). She is an Editor of the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law.

Fleur van der Houwen is affiliated with the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication, VU University Amsterdam. Her research interests include institutional interaction (especially legal and medical settings), lay-professional communication, new media technologies for communication and authorship analysis. She also serves a linguistic consultant and expert for the police as well as private parties and teaches courses in forensic linguistics and gives workshops for (legal) professionals.

Michele Zappavigna is a lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. Her major research interest is the discourse of social media and she has published two books in this area: Discourse of Twitter and Social Media and Researching the Language of Social Media (with Ruth Page, Johann Unger and David Barton). Forthcoming is Discourse and Diversionary Justice: An Analysis of Ceremonial Redress in Youth Justice Conferencing (with JR Martin and Paul Dwyer).