I always appreciate a chance to learn what my colleagues are reading and finding interesting. And this year, I appreciate that they included two submissions related to language and law:
“By identifying and explaining the linguistic concepts that make up cohesion in writing, Baldwin provides the tools (if you know how to use them) for giving teachers and students (especially international students) objective criteria for understanding and applying the magic glue of cohesion in their own writing, rather than having to rely on subjective or metaphorical instructions that require a shared cultural context between teacher and student.”
“This is one of my favorite papers of 2024, which succeeds in pursuing a fundamental question of practical and theoretical significance with new empirical methods. Martínez et al. examine the success of the plain language movement by studying a dataset of the text of every law passed by Congress between 1951 and 2009. They compare statutory language to language in other genres, clarifying what makes the former difficult for ordinary Americans to understand.”
Enjoy! And wishing everyone a peaceful, lawful, and happy 2025!
I and others on the Georgetown Legal English faculty have been very involved over the past two years in providing Legal English support to Ukrainian law schools in connection with a larger rule-of-law initiative.
What we hadn’t realized until my colleague Prof. John Dundon saw the below post on the Forensic Linguistics listserv is that there’s a fantastic English-Ukrainian legal dictionary translation project that has also been well underway and is also connected to rule of law efforts. We were extremely excited to learn that such a project exists and have already been in touch with the organizers to figure out if there might be any ways to collaborate or provide support.
Below is the text of the original announcement. It’s for an in-person event in the UK. But if you contact the organizer, you can also get access to a Zoom link.
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Supporting the Rule of Law in Ukraine: The role of the English-Ukrainian legal dictionary translation project
Tuesday 15th October, 10:00-14:15 Lloyd Suite, Edgbaston Park Hotel, University of Birmingham, UK
Dear Colleagues,
We are delighted to invite you to a research event showcasing a UKRI funded English-Ukrainian Legal Dictionary translation project. Legal and linguistic experts from Ukraine’s Constitutional Court, the Department of Constitutional Law at Ivan Franko National University Lviv, and the University of Birmingham Law School, have combined their extensive expertise to develop an ‘English-Ukrainian’ Legal Dictionary.’ Through historical and legal analysis, this first of its kind dictionary will rectify the acute problems that continued application of post-Soviet legal terminology cause for understanding the rule of law in Ukrainian jurisprudence.
By providing correct translations of over 5,000 English-language legal terms, we seek to further embed the rule of law in Ukraine, support Ukraine’s development as a constitutional democracy and advance Euro-Atlantic integration. We invite you to attend this showcase event to meet the lead researchers and practitioners who have developed this unique handbook for scientists, human rights defenders, lawyers, judges, parliamentarians, and everyone who deals with international legal documents. Join us and lend your support to this interinstitutional initiative to help establish the rule of law in Ukraine and enshrine Ukrainian independence from Russian-dominated legal interpretation.
Professor Robin Mason, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (International), University of Birmingham
10.40-11.05
The Case for an English-Ukrainian Legal Dictionary
Mr Serhiy Holovaty, Chairman of the Standing Committee on Legal Terminology of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine. Head of the Ukrainian Academy of Legal Sciences. (Former Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine)
11.05-11.30
The Dictionary’s impact and real-world application in the Ukrainian legal context
Professor Serhii Riznyk, Justice, Constitutional Court of Ukraine
Professor Olena Boryslavska, Head of the Department of Constitutional Law, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv
11.30 -11.50
Coffee break
11.50-12.15
Compiling the Dictionary’s 5000 terms and translations: linguistic, legal and phonological principles Associate
Professor Nataliia Hrynia, Department of Foreign Languages for the Humanities, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv
Professor Bohdan Azhnyuk, Director of the O. O. Potebnia Institute of Linguistics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv
12:15-12:40
Validating terms, translations and English Case Law examples: the British-Ukrainian collaborative process
Professor Lisa Webley, Head of the Centre for Research in Professional and Legal Education, Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham
Student researchers, Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham
Returning from parental leave, Prof. Cheng is set to teach sections of Legal English I and Professional Responsibility this fall. Additionally, he is working on a new Legal English Negotiations curriculum for the spring 2025 semester.
Professor Dundon had a busy summer, which started with his teaching an Advanced Contract Drafting class to LL.M. students at IE Law School in Madrid, Spain. It was his fifth summer teaching at IE Law, and he always feels very honored to be there – the school community is very welcoming, and the students themselves are always extremely impressive.
Next, Professor Dundon presented his research at two linguistics conferences in the United Kingdom: the i-Mean 7 Conference on Meaning in Social Interaction in Bristol, and then the 5th European Conference of the International Association for Forensic & Legal Linguistics in Birmingham. His first presentation was an explanation of procedural and evidentiary rules in U.S. trials that can affect linguistic analysis of trial testimony. The second presentation summarized Professor Dundon’s recent research about how U.S. Supreme Court Justices and attorneys at oral arguments sometimes speak “on behalf” of institutions and clients, and how this phenomenon manifests in linguistic features.
Professor Dundon then spent a month in Taiwan, teaching Contract Drafting in English to law students at the National Chengchi University College of Law and practicing attorneys at the Taipei Bar Association. It was one of his largest-ever classes (over 100 students), and Professor Dundon learned an incredible amount about the Taiwanese legal system from his students. He’s been invited back for a similar program next year and hopes to expand the course offerings to cover additional material.
Finally, Professor Dundon taught U.S. Legal Research, Analysis & Writing in Georgetown Law’s Summer Experience Program for entering LL.M. students.
It is hard to believe that the summer is almost over! We have several personal and professional highlights to share.
Prof. Julie Lake (left) and Prof. Heather Weger (right)
Vacations & Family Time
Since our last blog post, we took time to relax with our respective families.
Professor Julie Lake spent much of the summer with family and friends in Cape May (New Jersey), Chapel Hill (North Carolina), and Philadelphia (Pennsylvania). Though the sun was in full force in Cape May (aka, the “beach”), the jellyfish prevented her from swimming in the ocean. (It is hard to conquer these lifelong fears!) She was able to spend time with her husband and daughter, watching movies and TV shows about unicorns, playing her guitar, and completing kid-friendly art projects.
Professor Heather Weger traveled to Chicago (Illinois) and Richmond (Virginia) to visit her husband’s family), and she spent time with her Mom (from Arkansas) and sister (from North Carolina) as they visited her here in DC. She also spent a week at the beach (North Carolina), binge watching the Olympics, collecting sea shells with her children, and catching up on pleasure reading. Reconnecting with family always brings a renewed sense of identity and energy!
Summer Projects
Between family trips and vacations, we have continued to refine our asset-based approach to teaching Legal English. Specifically, we presented at the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) Biennial Conference in Indianapolis in July. In our presentation, “Linguists in Law School: Rebooting Legal Education to Empower Multilingual Law Students,” we highlighted the value that multilingual law students bring to law school and showed effective pedagogical strategies to enhance their Legal English. We also enjoyed the presentations we attended, and we came away with practices ratified (e.g., mindfulness of cultural and linguistic references in teaching), new practices introduced (e.g., a new approach to cultivating creativity), and some practices overturned (e.g., unexpected ways of handling plagiarism).
The Upcoming Academic Year
We look forward to another academic year with the Two-Year LL.M. program!
We are offering a newly designed course to the Two-Year LL.M. students, Academic Legal English: Special Topics, which engages students in experiential learning to enhance their oral communication skills, grammar skills, and professional language skills. The course topics include:
Reflecting on Legal English Skills
Listening to a Law School Lecture
Optimizing Study Strategies for Law School
Using (& Not Using) Generative AI in Law School
Participating in and Facilitating Law School Discussions
Using Grammar in Legal Contexts: Conditionals
Writing Academic and Professional Emails
Exploring the Scholarly Writing Genre
We also look forward to some exciting upcoming projects with our legal English colleagues at several Ukrainian law schools.
We will continue to participate in the monthly working group with Ukrainian linguists teaching in the law context.
As we reflect on its evolution over since 2008, we are proud of the quality legal English curriculum that the team has developed. We welcome the new cohort of students and look forward to staying in touch with the students in their second year!
I was also extremely honored to receive an “Individual Award”Recognition of Achievement in Global Legal Skills Education” award from the Global Legal Skills Institute for “creating collaborative exchanges between US and Ukrainian Legal Educators and for Promoting Legal Skills Education Around the World.”
The other fantastic part was getting to meet so many wonderful members of the Global Legal Skills community in person, including Mark Wojcik, David Austin, Lurene Contento, Chantal Morton, Kim Holst, Artem Shaipov, Louise Kulbicki, Natasha Costello, Claudia Amato, Lindsey Kurtz, Susan Dudley, John Thornton, Shelly Saltzman, Bythia Loudon, Kateřina Chudová, and many others. And particularly special was getting to finally meet in person Ukrainian law professors Oksana Kiriiak (Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University) and Nadiia Maksimentseva (Oles Gonchar Dnipro National University), who had both been active participants in all of the legal English trainings over the past year.
Prof. Oksana Kiriiak (left), Prof. Nadiia Maksimentseva (middle), & Prof. Horowitz (right)
Fact of the day: The bones of St. Nicholas (aka Santa Clause) are buried in the Basilica of Saint Nicholas in Bari. And thanks to a recommendation from a friend, I just started reading an amazing novel of historical fiction titled Nicked by M.T. Anderson which is set in Bari which tells the somewhat fictionalized story of how Santa’s bones ended up there.
Sri Lanka
Flew to Sri Lanka to lead workshops on legal English curriculum development for the University of Colombo and University of Jaffna in connection with USAID’s Efficient and Effective Justice (EEJ) Program in Sri Lanka. Also met with faculty from the Open University of Sri Lanka and University of Peradeniya to lay the groundwork for legal English curriculum support. Similar to the situation in Ukraine, law schools in Sri Lanka are in the process of moving to English-only curriculum.
Ukraine
Initiated conversations with Georgetown Law faculty to establish a sort of umbrella “Ukraine legal support” group within the Georgetown Law community in order to identify and connect the various people and entities within the law school that have been involved with providing law-related support to Ukraine. The goal is to be able to increase opportunities for collaboration and info sharing and also establish a central point of contact for inquiries, events, getting involved, etc.
Looking forward to re-starting the weekly Legal English Conversation sessions for Ukrainian law and legal English faculty that I’ve run for the past year. In each session, some subset of the 30+ Ukrainian faculty members and 30+ US/EU faculty members join and are paired off in breakout rooms for legal English conversation. (If interested in being added to the list of volunteers, please feel free to email me at stephen.horowitz@georgetown.edu.)
Looking forward to continuing to support the organization of Legal English trainings for Ukrainian law and legal English faculty.
Looking forward to continuing to support the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Peer-to-Peer Writing Project, which matches KMA students with American law students, including several from Georgetown Law for all three semesters the program has run so far.
Continued providing the online self-guided pre-LLM legal English program for fellows in the ABA Afghan Legal Professionals Scholarship & Mentoring Pilot Program. The course, which I co-created, is hosted on the USLawEssentials learning management system. The course is made available for free to all fellows in the program who have completed the legal English assessment designed by Prof. Lindsey Kurtz (Penn State Law), Prof. Dan Edelson (Seton Hall Law), and me last year to support the ABA Pilot Program.
*Once again co-taught with Prof. Daniel Edelson (Seton Hall Law) a 4-week bar essay skills course (for MEE and MPT) this summer through USLawEssentials using a “pay what you can” model to make legal English bar support accessible to all LLM students who need it.
Online Legal English
Continued my annual tradition of teaching part of the summer pre-LLM English for American Law School course for incoming LLM students at St. John’s Law School. After leaving St. John’s in 2020, I collaborated with Daniel Edelson to create an online version of the summer legal English program in St. John’s Canvas system. The course content, which we designed to be used as both a synchronous or self-guided course, helps students learn the basics of the US legal system, US law school culture, legal writing, and case reading and analysis.
Fall 2024 Semester
Excited to be teaching sections of both Legal English and US Legal Research & Writing this semester to the Two-Year LLM students this fall semester!
Thanks to my Legal English colleague Prof. John Dundon (who is also in the middle of completing his PhD in linguistics at Georgetown) for putting the Georgetown University Department of Linguistics Annual Newsletter on my radar. One of the unique benefits of being part of the Legal English faculty at Georgetown Law is getting to exist and work in the same university as one of the top linguistics programs in the U.S.
The Newsletter highlights an amazing range of talented folks and fascinating accomplishments. It also provides a great overview of what “linguistics” covers in the current era. Below is a small sampling of items from the newsletter.
We were excited to see Prof. John Dundon, who teaches in Georgetown Law’s Two-Year LLM Program, representing Georgetown Legal English at the recent Georgetown Law Faculty Scholarship & Teaching Luncheon. The scholarship display included two recent publications (see below) by Prof. Dundon, who has a J.D., M.A. in Applied Linguistics and is in the process of obtaining his PhD in Sociolinguistics.
Dundon, J.T. (2024). Language ideologies and speaker categorization: A case study from the U.S. legal system. International Journal of Legal Discourse, 9(1), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijld-2024-2007
Dundon, J.T. (2023). ‘A shifting precipice of unsettled law’? A survey of how U.S. courts treat expert testimony using forensic stylistics. The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 30(1), 119-137. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.23788
The presentation described efforts by Prof. Edelson, Dr. Kurtz, and me to develop a better approach to legal English assessment for law school purposes, and the intersection with the ABA Afghan Legal Professionals Scholarship & Mentoring Pilot Program (the “Pilot Program”), led by Michael Byowitz and Dana Katz, the Chair/Founder and the Vice-Chair respectively of the ABA Afghan Legal Professionals Resettlement Task Force, which administers the Pilot Program. The program was in need of language assessment support to help it guide former Afghan judges and lawyers in re-establishing their careers in the United States, a common path being matriculation in a one-year LL.M. program at a US law school followed by the taking of a bar exam.
Between August 2023 and April 2024 we conducted over 20 legal English assessments using an approach designed with the help of Dr. Kurtz’s expertise based on a variety of underlying principles and best practices which Kurtz detailed in the presentation.
About halfway through the assessment process, the Pilot Program also communicated a need for pre-LL.M. Legal English support to help the Afghan legal professionals improve their language and knowledge in connection with the US legal education system. This led to the creation of a self-guided online Legal English program comprised of six modules on Edelson’s USLawEssentials learning management platform, which has proved to be a hit with the Afghan legal professionals.
The takeaways from the presentation were that the collaboration has been extremely effective in better supporting the Afghan legal professionals, and all of us involved have greatly appreciated the opportunity to learn from each other and contribute to an innovative solution to a challenging bigger picture problem. It has also been a unique honor and pleasure to have the opportunity to interact with some of the top legal minds from Afghanistan.
We are very grateful to Prof. Radnovic and the ILEA/LL.M. Conference organizers for giving us the chance to share this experience.
Despite teaching the same Two-Year LLM program Legal English course the past three years (same content, different sections), my esteemed colleague Prof. John Dundon and I just realized we differ on whether, when focusing on the line of criminal procedure cases and Miranda rights during our Legal English II course, the correct version of the phrase should generally be plural (i.e., Miranda warnings), or whether it is also acceptable for it to be singular (i.e., Miranda warning.)
I won’t say who was advocating for which side, but the argument for exclusively plural was that the Miranda v. Arizona opinion includes multiple items for which a warning must be provided, including the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney. The argument against was that the multiple items can be viewed collectively as one warning.
The only civilized way to settle this debate between two lawyer-linguists, of course, was to follow the descriptivist path of looking to the corpora.
So do those arguing for the exclusive preference for the plural have the right to remain silent? Not without first consulting an attorney. In fact, nine of them.
If the corpus is instead the line of Miranda cases from our course, all of which were decided by the U.S. Supreme Court–the esteemed body that originated Miranda rights and its associated language–then suddenly we see an extremely strong predilection for the view that Miranda is actually comprised of several warnings, which suggests that the plural may in fact be correct. And the singular version is then just a vulgar mutation that has been adopted by the masses. (Or, stated more objectively, a variation that has been adopted in less specialized settings.)
So what’s a lawyer-linguist legal English teacher working with Miranda cases to tell their students? Our takeaway is to just share this blog post with them so they recognize that the appropriate form–single or plural–likely depends on the context and the audience.
If you’re writing a brief for the court or you’re a judge writing an opinion or perhaps a law professor writing a law journal article, then plural seems the preferred option. But if you’re writing a news article or a client email or having a cocktail party conversation, then singular is would seem to be just fine.
If you disagree with us, then you have the right to consult with an attorney-linguist. And if you cannot afford one, then we will be happy to provide you with one of course.
Profs. Weger and Lake, who both teach in Georgetown Law’s Two-Year LLM Program, plan to use the funds for the purchase of research materials related to legal writing for multilingual students. Weger explained, “We are on a mission to use linguists to bridge the gap between legal content and multilingual legal experts.”
It was an honor to work with such dedicated colleagues and students. We look forward to future collaborations of this kind. Stay tuned for a more detailed blog post in January!
This September, Professor Dundon was invited to participate as a panel discussant at a linguistics conference at the University of Bonn, Germany. The title of the conference was “Language as a Social Practice: Constructing (a)symmetries in legal discourse,” and Professor Dundon spoke on a panel (together with professors from Germany and Finland) about how asymmetries in legal discourse can lead to societal injustice.
He thoroughly enjoyed attending the conference and considers himself very fortunate to have been invited to meet with so many leaders in the field of language and law. The conference proceedings will be published (together with a contribution from Professor Dundon) in an upcoming volume with Cambridge University Press.
In other news, Professor Dundon is finishing up his final year of coursework towards his doctorate in sociolinguistics. This semester, he is researching interactional features of Supreme Court oral arguments, and specifically the “production format” of utterances made by attorneys as they negotiate having to speak on behalf of themselves, their client, and their legal team. Professor Dundon is also conducting a survey of ideologies about language use and language learning on the public-facing websites of local bilingual schools in the District of Columbia.
*Collaborated with Artem Shaipov of USAID’s Justice For All program and several other legal English professors (Alissa Hartig, Susan Dudley, Catherine Beck, Oksana Kiriiak, and Linda Pope) to provide multiple legal English trainings for Ukrainian law faculty and legal English faculty over the course of the Fall 2023 semester.
*Led one of the trainings–9 sessions of Legal English Conversation–and recruited a cohort of 15 additional law/legal English volunteers (including colleague John Dundon) to engage with Ukrainian faculty in each Legal English Conversation session.
*Currently in the process of setting up additional trainings during Spring 2024. And planning a new round of matching Ukrainian law schools with any international law school/legal English faculty interested in teaching a course, guest lecturing, providing support for academic publishing, or helping in other ways. (Email Stephen.Horowitz@georgetown.edu if interested in volunteering in some capacity.)
*Recruited Georgetown Law JD students to participate in a six-week peer-to-peer legal writing project with students from Kyiv Molhya Academy University during the fall semester that involved JD students from several other US law schools as well. Currently recruiting more Georgetown Law students for the next session to start late January.
*Created, with Daniel Edelson, a self-guided online pre-LLM legal English program (i.e., Fundamentals of the US Legal System; Reading Cases; Legal Writing) to help prepare Afghan candidates getting ready to start an LLM program at a US law school.
*Currently working with ABA program leaders to recruit additional mentors–both law faculty and law students–to provide legal English and other support for the candidates. (Email Stephen.Horowitz@georgetown.edu if interested in volunteering.)
Japan
*Guest-lectured in three classes for the legal English course at Keio University Law School on the topics of Case Reading Strategies and the Language of Analogy.
USA
*Teaching a December/January “Bar Essay Writing Skills for LLM Students” online course for USLawEssentials together with Prof. Daniel Edelson. The course is designed to be accessible to all students who need it regardless of finances, and provides specialized bar essay writing support geared to non-native English speakers.
*Received a wonderful email from a former student, reprinted with her permission:
“I found out I passed the New York bar yesterday! I wanted to thank you specifically because both torts and criminal law came up on the exam. The torts essay was asking for all elements of negligence so that was our entire final exam for Legal English 1. The criminal law essay had 4 sub issues and they were all about Miranda rights, custodial interrogation and whether the defendant waived it knowingly, voluntarily and intelligently. Thank you again for the classes. I remember writing everything I learned from classes instead of from the bar prep materials for those two essays. I’m really grateful for that!” —Sokunthyda Long (Cambodia), graduate of the 2-Year LLM Program at Georgetown Law
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Wishing everyone a happy, healthy, and peace-filled holidays and New Year!
“What prompted you to combine Law and English as a Second Language?”
“What connections do you see between writing for lawyers, linguistics, English as a Second Language, and the plain language movement? How do you see these fields working together to promote clarity and equity?”
“How can other lawyers help clients who speak English as a second language? What should lawyers know about ESL processing that would help them better serve clients?”
“How can professors help students who speak English as a second language?”
Below are some quotes from the interview:
“In Japan I encountered so many situations and behaviors that felt uncomfortable and at times even irrational. I learned to stop myself and consider the possibility that it actually was rational if you’re working from a different set of assumptions. And I learned to question and evaluate my own assumptions about how things should work before I fell back on a judgmental view or comment. It’s led me to a passionate curiosity for trying to understand why people do things they do.”
“The plain English movement is a reaction to a sense that the writing of lawyers and judges had become unnecessarily complicated and was acting as a barrier to access to justice. Although not stated explicitly, the plain English movement seems to me to assume native English speakers as its primary users and consumers. Legal English, on the other hand, is a catch-all term relating to the approach and curriculum for helping lawyers and law students from other language backgrounds study or work with US (or UK, Canadian, Australian, etc.) law or contracts in English.”
“The primary overlap [between Plain English and Legal English] is probably with regard to input. In the case of plain English, if you simplify language and use fewer words, then there is less information to process, both in volume and complexity. That should work to the benefit of non-native English speakers. In other words, using plain English makes a text closer to the idea of “comprehensible input.” Of course, it’s also possible that even a text that meets plain English standards could still be challenging for a non-native English speaker to understand for a variety of reasons, including vocabulary, grammar, and cultural knowledge gaps. And of course among non-native English speakers, there will also always be a wide range of facility with English.”
“However, it seems to me that plain English and legal English begin to diverge regarding output. This is because plain English can often be conveyed as a series of prescriptivist rules and principles for how to use and not use language. Whereas in legal English, the priority is generally learning to communicate one’s ideas accurately, with style a little lower down the priority list depending on the student. From a legal English teaching perspective, we want the students to learn to feel confident in expressing their ideas.”
