I was born in the province of Friesland in the Netherlands.  I don't remember an awful lot about living there.  I do remember making little clay boats and learning to whistle.  I still whistle, incidentally, a legacy of growing up on a farm. 

There was a lot of water around our dairy--we essentially lived surrounded by water--and my sister and I fell into the canal in front of our house more than once.  Fortunately, my parents could swim!  My mother eventually took to tying me to a tree in the front yard with a rope, one side attached to my suspenders, and the other to the tree.  Degrading but effective.  Here's a photo of me on the milk boat that came to take our milk to the creamery:

When my uncles and aunts get together, they have a lot of stories about the farm, especially during the war (i.e., World War II).  The Germans were constantly looking for young men the age of my father and uncles to work as slave labor in their factories.  But, remember, the farm was surrounded by water.  There was a bridge to the road, but it was usually left open so that boats could pass.  People who wanted to cross over the bridge had to honk.  So if the Germans wanted to conduct a raid, generally at night, they first had to honk for someone to come close the bridge.  The family's boys and girls slept two to a bed.  When they heard the honking, the boys would run off to hide in the hay and girls spread out over the beds so that the Germans would not find a warm bed unoccupied.  The Germans would sometimes poke in the hay with their bayonets--one uncle almost lost an ear (or so he claims)--but otherwise the system worked.

When I was five years old, we emigrated to the United States.  We flew over in a large and noisy airplane that had four propellers.  It could not make the trip without refueling, so we had to stop at Shannon airport in Ireland and New York City before landing in Los Angeles.  I cried all the way because I missed my grandmother (Beppe Brechtsje).

We lived in the house below.  That Chevy Bel Aire was a nice car!  My father worked for one of my uncles who had preceded us to the US (in San Luis Rey, California). 

In case my mother is reading this, I should point out that we only lived in this humble abode for about two years, and that our subsequent houses, while never opulent, were definitely a step up.  And my mother, being Dutch, kept the inside immaculate.  I think it must have been rather traumatic for me, because I had recurrent nightmares of being on the end of the pier in Oceanside, near where we lived, and large waves breaking the beginning of the pier, leaving me stranded at the end.  I had those dreams for years afterward.

Before too long, my father went into business for himself.  I thus mainly grew up on various dairy farms in the San Joaquin Valley of California. It was a nice life to grow up on a farm, although we were obviously fairly isolated (this may explain my deviant personality!).  One of my favorite places was early on, when we lived in a small two-bedroom house, which was not really large enough for my parents and the three children.  My sisters got the bedroom, and I had to sleep in a small trailer in the back yard.  I loved it!  It was tiny, but it had a very small kitchen and bathroom, so for about a year (when we moveed to a larger house) I had my own little place away from everyone else.  I had completely forgotten about this, but a few months ago was watching a movie in which someone was referred to as "trailer trash."  I realized that I had been trailer trash for a year.

Growing up on a farm, you learn a lot about nature and animals.  In fact, when I was in sixth or seventh grade, my father apparently decided that it was time for some sex education.  The problem was that my father was fairly reserved and also quite religious.  In other words, not the type of person who easily talks about sex.  One day we were working on the dairy.  Each corral had about 50 or 60 cows in it, along with one bull.  The purpose of the bull is to impregnate the cows.  Dairy cows need to have a calf about once a year, because this causes them to produce more milk.  But sometimes the cow and bull just don't seem to get along, so the cow fails to get pregnant.  Artificial insemination might be an option, but before doing that, we normally put the cow and bull into a small pen, where it was impossible for them to avoid each other.  I had helped my father do this often enough.  This time, however, there was a critical difference.  When they were in the pen, he said: "Watch!"  That one word was the extent of my sex education.  Fortunately, I had enough imagination to draw the connection.

Even as a child I was interested in language, perhaps because my native tongue was Frisian. I was also exposed to Dutch at an early age, and I had to learn English when I was five or six years old.  When I entered high school in Sanger, California, I enrolled in a Latin class because I had decided to become a lawyer.  In retrospect this was pretty silly, because most lawyers know no more than two or three Latin phrases (res ipsa loquitur, mens rea, and de minimis non curat lex is enough for general purposes).  Interestingly, the obvious connections of Latin to other Romance languages and English revived my interest in language, so when I entered Stanford University, I had forgotten that I wanted to become a lawyer.  Instead, I majored in German studies and took several courses in linguistics (there was no undergraduate major at Stanford in linguistics in those days, although I was a student member on a committee to set one up--also on the committee were Elizabeth Traugott and Joseph Greenberg, both of whom taught at Stanford at the time).  Thus, my interest in both law and language can be traced to my youth.

I still came home during the summers to work on the dairy:

During my sophomore year at Stanford I went to study abroad at Stanford in Vienna (Vienna XIII, as our group was known.)  It was a great experience.  We made field trips to Berlin and to Istanbul.  One of the professors was George Renz, who had worked for the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) and was married to an Egyptian woman.  He was planning to go to Egypt after our time in Austria was over and invited me to visit them in Cairo, never imagining that I might actually do it.  I took a train to Athens, got on a boat in Piraeus that was bound for Alexandria, then took a train to Cairo.  They were VERY surprised when I showed up to visit them, but were extremely hospitable.  They showed me all around Cairo, and I then took a train on my own to Luxor, where I rented a bicycle to visit the Valley of the Kings.

After graduation from Stanford, I went to the Netherlands for a year, where I taught English at a high school for a year in Amsterdam.  At the University of Amsterdam I audited a class in Old Low Franconian, which eventually became the basis for the Dutch language.  The professor was an old man, Cola Minis, who wished to interview me before letting me audit the course.  His office was on the second story in one of the old buildings along a canal in Amsterdam--I think it was the Prinsengracht.  We had a pleasant chat and he suggested that, with my interest in phonology (the study of sounds in language), I might wish to visit his friend, Jan de Vries.  I recognized the name as being that of the author of a well-known dictionary of Dutch etymology.  So he wrote out a formal letter of introduction that I could give to Dr. de Vries and also gave me his telephone number.

As I was walking down the stairs, the professor's assistant came up next to me and said, "I should tell you that De Vries was wrong."  (In Dutch: "Ik moet je vertellen dat De Vries fout was").  I wasn't sure what to make of this, so I thanked him and continued down the stairs.  But he persisted: "I don't think you understood me: De Vries was wrong in the war."  Well, we all make mistakes, I thought, and we probably make even more mistakes during wars.  I met with De Vries a few weeks later.  He was a very old man and had a nice enough discussion about ablaut in the Proto-Indo-European verbal paradigm, or something along those lines.

A few months later I was doing some reading and found out exactly how "wrong" De Vries had been.  He had cooperated with the German occupation of the Netherlands and fled to Germany as the Allies approached toward the end of the war.  He was arrested after the war, returned to the Netherlands, received a prison sentence of around 2 years, and also a "publicatieverbod," or prohibition on publication, for about 10 years.

Soon afterwards I began graduate studies in linguistics at the University of California, San Diego.  My main interest was in phonology and historical linguistics.  I received a Fulbright Fellowship to study in the Netherlands, during which time I did fieldwork and other research on the phonology of the Frisian spoken in the village of Grou.  That work, which was published as a monograph by the Frisian Program at the Free University of Amsterdam, formed the basis of my dissertation, which was entitled The Lexicon in Phonological Theory.  You haven't heard of it?  Don't worry, I've almost forgotten about it myself.  But I was one of the first to write and print out my dissertation on a computer, printing it using a process called troff (a UNIX application).  Previously, graduate students had their dissertations professionally typed, which cost a fair amount of money.  The Graduate Studies division later asked me to write a manual on how to write a dissertation, and in particular how to deal with new printing technology.

I received my Ph.D. and worked as a part-time lecturer in linguistics and director of the U.C.S.D. language house for two years, located in Beagle Hall.  Best job I ever had.  I got room and board in a nice apartment on campus and ran programs for the French, German, and Spanish floors of the language house.  Examples: inviting a grad student in Spanish literature and friend of mine, Madeline Sutherland, to talk about her work on Spanish Ballads.  Or showing classic movies in German, French, or Spanish.  La Grande Illusion is probably my favorite.  The German wine tasting was also a big hit.

One summer, a friend and I decided to take a trip to Baja California in his car.  We drove down around 300 miles below the border, where we entered the Vizcaino desert.  It's a desolate but also very interesting area full of very large cactus.  There are also some old ruined Spanish missions in the area, and as we were driving near Catavina we came across a sign suggesting that one of these old missions could be found around 5 or 10 km to the right.  It was a dirt road, not unusual in Baja.  At some point we passed through a dry streambed and promptly got stuck.  We tried to get the car out of there, but the wheels just kept burrowing deeper into the loose sand.  My friend, Bruce, was beginning to dispair, so I decided to leave him with the car and started walking back to highway 1.  I think it was about an hour's walk.  In those days, a car came by on that stretch of the highway around once every 5 or 10 minutes, but when I tried to wave them down, they obviously thought I was some kind of crazed gringo and zipped on by.  After standing there for half an hour or so, it became obvious that I needed an alterntive plan.  I noticed that off in the distance, there seemed to be a small building, so I headed in that direction.  It turned out to be a small restaurant with five or six people inside.  I went in and explained our situation in my broken Spanish.  One of the men volunteered to help, accompanied by a local Indian who apparently had imbibed quite a bit of beer and engaged me in an interesting comparison of "las chicas norteamericanas" and "las chicas mexicanas."  As we got into their pickup, I asked whether they had a chain (tienen una cadena?).  Si, they replied.  So we careened through the desert on a back road and found a very relieved Bruce, who quickly downed a couple of cans of Tecate beer that we had brought along.   When I asked where the chain was, they replied that it was back at the restaurant!  I guess they understood me a bit too literally (Note to linguists: surely Grice's maxim of relation applies in Spanish?).   Anyway,  we came back with the chain, they pulled Bruce's car out, and we returned to the restaurant and distributed a few sixpacks of Tecate beer. 

Eventually I left UCSD and became a visiting assistant professor in the English Department at Miami University in Ohio for a year.  While there, I received grants to do some more research on Frisian in the Netherlands.  This resulted in my Frisian Reference Grammar.  I typed this on a standalone word processor called the Lexitron, which was in the departmental offices and available to faculty after normal office hours.

While I probably could have stayed on for a few more years at Miami University, this was essentially a dead-end position and prospects for a tenure-track job elsewhere in linguistics did not seem promising, especially because I preferred to have some control over where I lived.  I thus enrolled in the law school at the University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall) and graduated three years later.

Although I intended to change careers, I always retained a love for the academic life.  Moreover, I was fascinated by the large number of linguistic issues that I encountered in law school and was inspired to reread some of the literature on speech act theory (especially J.L. Austin's How to Do Things With Words and John Searle's Speech Act Theory) during the summers.  In fact, my "student note" (essentially a student-written article for the school's law review) sought to apply speech act theory to the concepts of offer and acceptance in contract law.

Following graduation, I was a law clerk for Justice Stanley Mosk of the California Supreme Court for one year, and then worked as an associate attorney at law firms in San Francisco and Santa Barbara for three years, primarily in litigation.  Before long, my love for the academic life resurfaced, and I sent job applications to a few law schools in Los Angeles (my wife was a graduate student in Santa Barbara and did not want to relocate, so a nationwide search was not an option).  Loyola Law School hired me, later granted me tenure, and I have been there ever since.

As my list of publications shows, my research interests since then have revolved around language and law.  I have written about speech acts and contract law, Gricean implicature and the law of perjury, the legal significance of silence, the distinction between "speech" and "conduct" in First Amendment law, and the difference between legal and ordinary language interpretation.  An issue that has received a fair amount of attention from linguists interested in the law is the comprehensibility of jury instructions, and I have written several articles on the topic.  Although it is theoretically not all that interesting because it involves the recurrent application of a limited number of principles, it has tremendous practical value.  Starting in 1997 I was a member of a California Judicial Council taskforce that was charged with revising our state's jury instructions in a way that makes them more understandable; we released several dozen samples for public comment. The California Judicial Council approved them for use in the courts in 2005.  I have also advised New York and Vermont courts on their jury instructions, and I am currently on the California committees that keep our instructions current.

Around 1995 or 1996 I began work on my book, Legal Language, which appeared in 1999 and has since come out in paperback.  This project began when I realized that David Mellinkoff's seminal book, The Language of the Law (1963), was seriously out of date, though it had undeniably become a classic work in the area.  In Legal Language I covered some of the same ground as Mellinkoff, but also incorporated the modern research on language and the law, delved much more deeply into oral legal language, and devoted several chapters to the plain English movement (which Mellinkoff to some extent inspired, but could necessarily not have described at the time).

Following that project I began working, together with Lawrence Solan of Brooklyn Law School (another legal academic with a doctorate in linguistics) on a book entitled Speaking of Crime: The Language of Criminal Justice.  In it we survey the various ways in which linguistics is relevant to the criminal law, including analysis of consent searches, Miranda warnings, how well people and linguistic experts can identify a person by her voice or writing style, and the various crimes of language (e.g., solicitation, conspiracy, threats, perjury).  The book was published by the University of Chicago Press in early 2005.

I am currently investigating the nature of legal texts.  The transition from oral legal transactions to written texts is fascinating and has had some very significant consequences.  Wills, for example, were originally oral.  Later clerics began making written records of the oral ceremony, but at this stage the oral performance would still have been regarded as primary.  Eventually, wills could only be in writing, and any oral expressions of testamentary intent (including modifications or additions to the written will) became invalid.  This transition to written texts led to a lawyerly fixation on the exact words of the text that still reverberates today.

Similar transitions took place in other areas of the law.  At one time laws could be made orally, for instance, but now they must invariably be enacted in written form.  As with wills, this has a tendency to promote a relatively literal or acontextual method of interpretation, thus helping to explain the rise of the plain meaning rule (or textualism).  At the same time, it is important to realize that the shift to written statutes, where the words of the statutes are deemed to embody the intentions of the lawmaker, does not inevitably require literalistic interpretation.  How we interpret statutes is ultimately a matter of policy, it seems to me.

Besides statutes, the other main source of law in the Anglo-American legal system is precedent, as set forth in judicial opinions.  Here also we can discern a progression from purely oral opinions, to oral opinions that are memorialized by a written record or report, to a final stage where the opinion must be written by the judge or judges themselves.  Interestingly, the English legal system still allows binding precedents to be made by oral decisions, although there is a strong preference for written reports.  In the United States, on the other hand, judicial opinions have been written by the judges themselves virtually from the foundation of the republic.  This has some very significant consequences for how the notion of precedent is conceptualized in England and the US.  As you might expect, precedent is much more textual in the United States.  As to the details, you'll just have to wait until I textualize my thinking on this matter in authoritative written form.