LANGUAGE and the LAW
COURSE DESCRIPTION

Peter Tiersma
Burns 424
Loyola Law School, Los Angeles
213-736-1162
Peter.Tiersma@lls.edu
website: www.tiersma.com

[NOTE: first meeting is Wednesday, January 7, at 10am in C-003.]

    This course is a seminar on language and the law.  Although the exact content changes from year to year, the seminar covers the history of legal language, the nature of legal language, statutory interpretation and issues relating to legal meaning, the nature of legal texts, use of language in the courtroom (including questioning and persuasion strategies used by lawyers), comprehensibility of jury instructions, interpretation of legal texts, the plain English movement, and sometimes language rights and the English-only movement.

    This course may fulfill Loyola's upper division writing requirement.  See the student handbook for the exact requirements regarding length, etc., of papers.  The substantive legal area is quite open, but I do require that all papers must apply at least some of the concepts that were covered in class. Your ability to apply these linguistic concepts to a legal problem and to refer to materials that you read will be a significant part of your grade.  A paper that, standing on its own, might be an excellent discussion of a legal issue, but which does not sufficiently incorporate course materials, will get a mediocre grade.

    The last two or three classes will be devoted to student presentations of their papers.

Texts:
There are two required texts:

1.    Peter Tiersma, Legal Language (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999).
2.    Reader available from graphics soon after the semester begins.

Return to Tiersma.com