Category Archives: What exactly is…

An inside look at the Canadian Supreme Court

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The bench of the Supreme Court of Canada – the only bilingual (English and French) and bijural (common law and civil law) supreme court in the world – currently includes three justices who were law graduates of McGill Law School, and the university’s Alumni blog recently published an interview with the three judges, Sheilah Martin, Mahmud Jamal and Nicholas Kasirer.

The Court works and decides cases in English and French, in all areas of law (such as family, criminal, and tax law).

The judges each give their own perspective on the job, and in particular how life at the Canadian Supreme Court differs from its American counterpart. Continue reading →

What exactly is legal translation?

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In the article below I wanted to provide some insights into the arcane world of the legal translator. The aim was to have some kind of go-to text that I could send people who have no idea what the profession is all about.

I hope readers will find it useful – some may find it informative depending on their backgrounds, and I would encourage any readers who feel that it could help to raise others’ awareness to share the post liberally. It’s all about roaring, don’t forget! 😉

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What exactly is document review?

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On the same subject as last week’s post From Louboutin to lawyer-linguists?, this guest post from Andrea Kaluzny is a tongue-in-cheek account as well as a great insight into the subject of document review, which is a particularly widespread practice in the United States.  As well as being a contract attorney providing multilingual support for litigation, Andrea is committed to volunteer work in several areas including, amongst others, animal welfare and human rights.

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What exactly is corpus linguistics?

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This post, in my mini-series of posts entitled ‘What exactly is…”, will try to give an overview of Corpus Linguistics and hopefully pique your interest to find out more.

First of all, a definition: a corpus is a collection of texts, often used to study language. These days, corpora are generally held electronically – access is much faster and analysis can be more powerful.

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What exactly is comparative law?

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Continuing with my mini-series “What exactly is…” (following on from What exactly is forensic linguistics? and What exactly is a lawyer-linguist?), today let’s take a brief look at the subject of Comparative Law.

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law* describes the discipline as “time-honoured but not easily understood in all its dimensions”. According to Michael Bogdan**, comparative law may be defined as “the comparing of different legal systems with the purpose of ascertaining the similarities and differences“.

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What exactly is a lawyer-linguist?

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This post is the second in a series I have called “What exactly is…”, the first of which examined the burgeoning subject of forensic linguistics.

The topic of lawyer-linguists has been interesting me for quite some time now, and popped up again recently on Twitter with a flurry of job offers from the European Central Bank for several languages.

Although this job title seems to be relatively new, you can see a very early lawyer-linguist on the right – Cicero…

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What exactly is forensic linguistics?

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This post tries to collect together a few definitions of a subject that is in the news more and more often – forensic linguistics.

The 2010 publication The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics states, in its introduction: “Forensic Linguistics is the study of language and the law, covering topics from legal language and courtroom discourse to plagiarism. It also concerns the applied (forensic) linguist who is involved in providing evidence, as an expert, for the defence and prosecution, in areas as diverse as blackmail, trademarks and warning labels.”

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