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Legal Studies Paper No. 2009-11 March 2009 What is Language and Law? And does anyone care? Professor Peter M. Tiersma Electronic copy available at: /abstract=1352075 Peter Tiersma What is Language and Law? And does anyone care? [This article appeared in Law and Language: Theory and Society (Frances Olsen, Alexander Lorz, Dieter Stein eds., 2008).] [The suggestion at the end of this article has been implemented: see www.ILLA.org] This paper will discuss in a very general sense the emerging interdisciplinary field of language and law, as well as its relationship to the individual disciplines of both law and linguistics. It will also examine more specifically the field of forensic linguistics. It’s hard to know when exactly the study of language and law began. But there has always been a close relationship between these two fields, even if that relationship has not always have been formally acknowledged. It may be possible to have language without having law. Indeed, it is likely to have been the situation for much of the early history of mankind. Of course, our prehistorical ancestors would almost certainly have developed customs and some method of informal dispute resolution at a relatively early stage of human history. But the word “law” suggests something more formal than mere custom. I would like to avoid the philosophical and jurisprudential debates regarding what is “law,” and how law differs from custom. Nonetheless, it seems safe to conclude that human beings had language long before they had law. Electronic copy available at: /abstract=1352075 10 Peter Tiersma