The third International Conference on Language and Law in Social Practice is to be held at the Royal Palace of Caserta, National School of Public Administration (Scuola Superiore della Pubblica Amministrazione), Italy, from 14 to 17 May 2014. This biennial conference (see this post and this post about the last one) brings together a wide variety of scholars and professionals, and those from the fields of language and the law, as well as other related areas. The 2014 conference “aims to bring together scholars to examine socially grounded issues of current interest in law and language that include, but are not limited to, the following cross-cutting themes in which English and other European as well as non-European languages, cultures and societies are involved:

• Modes of production and systems of legal rules and decisions, including institutions, processes, and behaviours;
• Identity, gender, race, religion, and social status, including human rights, ethnic diversity/equality, (anti)discrimination, migration, citizenship, and healthcare;
• Ideology and justice across the political spectrum, including professional responsibility relative to confidentiality, conflicts of interest, miscarriage of justice, and ethics in the practice of law;
• Crime and social deviance, including victimology, restorative justice, domestic/family violence, bullying, and other anti-social behaviours;
• Social environments of law in Internet-based communication, including social media law;
• Regulatory policy and risk in business law, including competition policy, compliance, governance, corporate social responsibility, public procurements/contracts, and legitimacy and accountability in international organizations;
• Conflict resolution, including conciliation, negotiation, mediation, arbitration, class actions, diplomacy, and peace-building;
• Forensic evidence relative to the investigation and trial of civil and criminal cases, and forensic medicine relative to the interaction between the practices of law and medicine.

Papers and posters were invited from diverse analytical perspectives including, but not necessarily limited to, the following areas of enquiry:

1. discourse and genre analyses, including ethnographic, web, or corpus-based analyses;
2. critical discourse analysis;
3. media and cultural studies;
4. conversation analysis;
5. multimodal and other non-linear approaches to discourse analysis;
6. forensic linguistics, including computational and multimodal analyses;
7. intercultural communication;
8. translation and interpreting, including lexicography/terminography;
9. argumentation/logic;
10. socio-legal and empirical legal studies.

Early-bird registration by 28 February. For more information see the conference website here. Organization: Department of Law, University of Naples 2, English Language Chair. Conference Convenor: Girolamo Tessuto.