The Faculty of Arts/Faculty of Law of the University of Porto (Porto, Portugal) will host the 3rd European Conference of the International Association of Forensic Linguists on the theme of Forensic Linguistics: Bridging the Gap(s) between Language and the Law.

The conference, which is organised jointly by the two Faculties, aims to bridge the gap(s) between language and the law by sharing the latest research in the field of forensic linguistics/language and the law, and will be held from 15 to 18 October 2012.

For more information, see the conference website.

LIST OF TOPICS:

Legal languages
– The history of legal languages
– The role of literacy in legal languages
– Legal genres
– Critical approaches to legal languages
– Language education for law professionals

Legal discourse
– Courtroom, police and prison discourse
– Investigative interviewing
– Multilingual matters in legal contexts
– Power and the law
– The comprehensibility of legal documents
– Interviews with vulnerable witnesses in the legal system

Language minorities and the legal system
– Linguistic disadvantage before the law
– Courtroom interpreting and translation
– Human Rights matters

Law on language
– Language rights
– Offensive language
– The linguist as expert witness

Linguistic evidence and investigative linguistics
– Forensic phonetics and speaker identification
– Forensic stylistics
– Linguistic determination of nationality
– Authorship analysis
– Plagiarism
– Trademark disputes
– Consumer product warnings
– Deception and fraud

Other related sub-themes
– Computational Forensic Linguistics
– Intercultural mediation
– Comparative law
– Multimodal approaches to forensic linguistics

You might also be interested in my post What exactly is forensic linguistics?