The English Language Chair of the Law Faculty of the Seconda Università degli Studi di Napoli is organizing its Second International Conference on Law, Language and Professional Practice. Drawing on some of the issues and discussions about the relationship between Law and Language in the first conference (17-19 June 2010), this second conference takes the theme forward by bringing into focus the third perspective of ‘professional practice’, which is particularly relevant to our increasingly globalized world today. Registration for the conference is now open.

“The conference aims to bring together scholars from applied linguistics and law as well as other disciplinary backgrounds to discuss the ways in which the issues of Law and Language play themselves out in professional practice in the legislative, (extra)-judicial, and educational spheres. Such issues may also tackle other professional practices of communication where law and language are involved to a greater or lesser extent.”

“For the academy, for example, the relationship between Law and Language provides room for researchers to focus on language training for legal and other professionals, and similarly provides others with a site in which to investigate university courses and programmes requiring an understanding of law and legal practice while still focusing on language.” 

These are the broad theme areas:

1. Law and language in legislative, judicial and Alternative Dispute Resolution practices, including miscarriages of (extra)-judicial practices
2. Law and language in other social and disciplinary practices
3. Cross-disciplinary studies (with specific focus on law and language) of the construction, analysis and/or interpretation of issues of race, gender and identity in contemporary law
4. Discourse and genre-based studies, including ethnographic or corpus-based analyses, of legal discourse in the media or corporate world
5. Issues of power and politics in language and law
6. Language, law and communication in socio-political and economic contexts
7. Law and language bridging the gap between the academy and the workplace, including interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary education in native/non-native contexts and electronic media resources
8. The question of professional identity in law and language in educational and professional practices
9. Legal translation and interpreting
10. Forensic linguistics
11. Plain language in law
12. Multimodal and other non-linear alternatives to the construction of legal discourse.