Lawrence M. Solan is the Don Forcelli Professor of Law and director of the Center for the Study of Law, Language and Cognition at Brooklyn Law School. Peter M. Tiersma is professor at Loyola University Law School. They are the authors, respectively, of The Language of Judges and Legal Language, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
"Speaking of Crime deepens our understanding not only of how
language and cognition work in the legal system, but also of the
nature of erroneous judgments and wrongful convictions in the
American criminal justice system. Solan and Tiersma's analysis
advances our understanding of how to achieve the system's most
fundamental goals--improving the fairness of legal procedures while
better separating the innocent from the guilty. This book deserves
therefore to be read not only by linguists and criminologists, but
also by judges and policy makers."--Richard Leo, Department of
Criminology, University of California, Irvine
"Speaking of Crime introduces insights drawn from linguistics and
psychology-of-language research that throw light on a number of
issues in our criminal process. It does an excellent job of
synthesizing and reviewing the relevant literature and sets out
interesting 'true crime' case illustrations of the lessons to be
learned from the science of language, many of which have yet to be
properly taken into account by the legal process."--Michael
Risinger, Seton Hall Law School
"Speaking of Crime is an engaging, insightful and gracefully
written tour of how language and cognitive psychology influence
criminal law doctrine and practice. It belongs in the library of
anyone who teaches, studies, or practices criminal
justice."--Jerome H. Skolnick, Center for Research on Crime and
Justice, New York University School of Law
"An important book in the emergent field of language and the law,
Speaking of Crime is essential reading for everyone whose interests
intersect these areas: judges, attorneys, legal scholars, and
sociolinguists. Solan and Tiersma look at a large number of
important cases--from the Lindbergh kidnapping to the Clinton
impeachment--to argue that a more sophisticated understanding of
the workings of language by the professionals involved might have
created very different, and more just, outcomes. Their discussion
of the ways in which linguistic analysis affects our understanding
of rights, crimes, and verdicts should be read by everyone."--Robin
Lakoff, Department of Linguistics, University of California,
Berkeley
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