Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.
From 11/25/20 xkcd (“A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language”)
And go to the Language Log blog (which is where I first aw this xkcd webcomic) for some great linguist commentary and reactions to this.
Ever since reading this webcomic, my life ambition has become to put it on a coffee mug and give the mugs out to everyone else at the law school outside of the Legal English Team to help shift the perception of the ways we help LLM students and other non-native English speaking law students.
Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.
For anyone who’s interested in learning more about linguistics from a language teaching perspective or who’s thought about doing a masters in applied linguistics or TESOL but doesn’t have the time, the creators of the Lingthusiasm podcast now have a YouTube channel with a series of short videos on the basics of linguistics called Crash Course Linguistics.
Can a lexicographer fend off the combined forces of Facebook, the Justice Department and the entire U.S. business lobby at the U.S. Supreme Court?
What if said lexicographer is also the co-author, with Justice Antonin Scalia, of a landmark book about textualism that is cited multiple times in the other side’s briefs?
Bryan Garner – the Black’s Law Dictionary editor, legal writing consultant and, with Justice Scalia, author of Reading Law – has joined the Supreme Court team of Noah Duguid, a Montana man who sued Facebook in 2015 for violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. And though he’s only been working with Duguid’s other lawyers for a matter of weeks, Garner’s influence on Duguid’s just-filed merits brief is unmistakable. Who else could so boldly assert that the TCPA’s meaning depends on whether the statute’s “adverbial modifier” applies to just one or both “disjunctive verbs” with a “common object”?
Without taking anything away from the well-deserved kudos for Bryan Garner, I want to underline how odd it is to suggest that without his help, lawyers couldn’t be expected to understand simple grammatical concepts like “adverbial modifier”, “disjunctive verb”, and “common object”.
Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.
I’ve realized in my legal English teaching that a lot of LLM students are not very familiar with American geography. And yet it’s very helpful background knowledge to know about in the context of studying in law school. I thought about it again today because my kids just got a game called The Scrambled States of America Game.
It’s based on a very clever children’s book called the Scrambled States of America. But more importantly, it can be an engaging and fun way for LLM students to get more familiar with American geography.
The way the Scrambled States of America Game seems to work (after watching my kids play it today) is that each person has 5 state cards in front of them. Each state has the state name, the capital, and the state’s nickname. Then you draw a card from the deck and it says something like “A state nickname with 4 different vowels in it.” So you look at your cards to see if you have one that fits the requirement, and you try to be the first to say that state’s name before the other players can identify one from their state cards. There’s also a map without state names that is put out that has some purpose that I haven’t had time to determine yet.
But it seems to create a lot of repeated exposures to state names and locations while connecting basic knowledge about states in a way that’s fun and leads to absorption of the info. On top of that, it’s social and a good ice-breaker. Plus it leads to lots of back and forth negotiating and commenting, all of which is good for speaking and listening practice.
Conclusion: This would be an ideal great game to play during LLM Orientation. Well, in a normal non-pandemic year anyway. And in that regard, it wouldn’t hurt if an online version could be created.
In his posts, Goldfarb relies on a corpus of language composed of actual language from the time period when the Constitution was created and then uses the corpus data to deconstruct the likely intended meaning of the language of the Second Amendment, including the words “bear,” “arms” and “militia.”
Needless to say, the linguistic investigation reaches fairly different conclusions from the Supreme Court that are worth understanding if you have any interest in Second Amendment law, and interpretation of terms in any legal case for that matter.
See below for additional readings on the application of linguistic principles in legal interpretation: to cons in interpreting language:
Goldfarb, Neal, “The Use of Corpus Linguistics in Legal Interpretation” (June 19, 2020). 2021. Annual Review of Linguistics. Vol. 7. Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3631374
Did I leave out any of your favorites? Let me know and I’ll add them to the list.
Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.
Since I started my new position at Georgetown Law in January, 2020 (just a couple months before the COVID-19 pandemic descended upon us), my primary focus has been developing a self-paced, asynchronous online legal English course. It’s been an exciting learning and creative experience, and the course now happily exists!
It’s called OLE: Orientation to the U.S. Legal System (though we have also created another iteration with the perhaps more literally descriptive title OLE: U.S. Legal System – Core Concepts & Vocabulary), and though it felt like this day would never arrive, I’ve now actually begun teaching it. (Note: OLE = Online Legal English)
Of course, I’m not teaching in the traditional sense. I’m not in a classroom and I don’t even have any lesson plans. All of that is embedded into the self-paced, do-it-yourself course. The course is set up so that students essentially work through it on their own, with various activities due each day and a final graded writing assignment due at the end of each week. The only synchronous component is are one or two Zoom office hour sessions each week that provide a chance for students to ask questions and discuss anything they want, and for all of us to get to know each other better. It’s this sort of “flipped classroom” model in an online, asynchronous set-up that I’ve never done before. And that I think has not yet been done in the legal English world. (And by the way, if I’m wrong, please don’t hesitate to let me know.)
Share who we are, what we do, and what we’ve been doing to help LL.M. and other learners learn more about law while improving their law-related English.
Connect and share ideas with others in the global community of those teaching legal English.
Stay tuned. There’s more to come. But while you’re waiting you can meet the Georgetown Legal English Faculty.
