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Roger W. Shuy, Creating language crimes: How law enforcement uses (and misuses) language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2007

Bethany K. Dumas
Bethany K. Dumas
Affiliation:
English, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-0430 USA, dumasb@utk.edu
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Extract

Roger W. Shuy, Creating language crimes: How law enforcement uses (and misuses) language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 194. Hb $29.95.

Legal process, whether civil or criminal, depends heavily on the medium of language. It is the glue that runs through all of legal process, the medium of all interactive communication prior to, during, and after trial process. In criminal law, it is also the spoken medium of police investigations, prisons, and consultations among lawyers and between lawyers and their clients. It is also the medium through which the innocent are sometimes convicted of crimes that they did not, in fact, commit. Creating language crimes explores the use of conversational strategies by cooperating witnesses, by law enforcement officers, and as trial evidence in a book that will serve to introduce many to the goals and methods of forensic linguistics in the criminal context, as well as to the specific conversational strategies sometimes used to convict innocent individuals.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Information
Language in Society , Volume 36 , Issue 5 , November 2007 , pp. 775 - 777
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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References

REFERENCES

Shuy, Roger W. (1993). Language crimes: The use and abuse of language evidence in the courtroom. Oxford: Blackwell (repr. 1996).
Shuy, Roger W. (1998a). Bureaucratic language in government and business. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Shuy, Roger W. (1998b). The language of confession, interrogation, and deception. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Shuy, Roger W. (2002). Linguistic battles in trademark disputes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.