Language and Law / Linguagem e Direito is a new free, exclusively online peer-reviewed journal to be published twice a year. 

The Editors are Malcolm Coulthard, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil, and Rui Sousa-Silva, Universidade do Porto, Portugal. The International Editorial Board comprises an impressive list of names from the fields of forensic linguistics, legal translation and interpreting, and more generally language and law.

A choice has been made to provide the journal free with online access. As you know, I try to champion open access in order to extend those famous bridges that are the leitmotif of this blog – to ensure that ideas cross boundaries between practitioners and academics, and between rich and poorer countries, not to mention across fields and disciplines.

To whet your appetite, here is a list of articles from the first issue (which also includes other items such as PhD abstracts and book reviews):

• Multilingualism and morality in statutory interpretation
• A fonética forense no Brasil: cenários e atores
• Identifying idiolect in forensic authorship attribution: an n-gram textbite approach
• Detecting translingual plagiarism and the backlash against translation plagiarists
• Death penalty instructions to jurors: still not comprehensible after all these years
• A atitude em boletins de ocorrência de crimes de linguagem contra a honra: um estudo da ofensa verbal na perspectiva do sistema de avaliatividade
• When is a lie not a lie? When it’s divergent: Examining lies and deceptive responses in a police interview
• Discurso, gênero e violência: uma análise de representações públicas do crime de estupro
• Linguistic minorities in court: the exclusion of indigenous peoples in Brazil
• Three stages of interpreting in Japan’s criminal process

I strongly encourage you to read the editors’ introduction explaining all about the journal (pages 8 and 9 of the first issue). I’m very excited about this – I hope you will be too. Just have to quote some words from the introduction:

“We chose the title Language and Law – Linguagem e Direito to indicate that we welcome articles across the whole spectrum of the discipline and from both practitioners and academic researchers. Thus, for example, this first issue includes contributions from a chief of police, a public prosecutor, a professional translator, a professional interpreter and two expert witnesses, as well as from academic lawyers and linguists.”

And to quote Malcolm Coulthard:

Not only is it open access but also copyright remains with the authors.  We are very anxious to allow everyone free access to new knowledge.

The journal is available here and can be downloaded as a whole issue, or you can download single items. It is hosted on the website of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto, Portugal (be patient when waiting for the website to load, your patience will be rewarded!). 

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You might also be interested in this post on Linguistica Antverpiensia, and this one on the Journal of Specialised Translation.