Alex Walker (CC ’19, Harvard Law ’23) spoke with us about his path to law school and how linguistics has shaped his approach to the “language of law.” Alex will speak at the Dressler Colloquium on Friday, April 24th, at 4pm, in Hamilton 702; all are welcome to attend!
Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
I grew up in Atlanta, but I’ve got family all over the country. At Columbia, I studied linguistics and did the Political Science-Economics program. After teaching high school Spanish (grades nine to twelve) for a hot second, I went to Harvard for law school and graduated in 2023. Since then, I have bounced around in one-year jobs, a fellowship at Harvard, then a clerkship for a judge on the Second Circuit (a federal appeals court), and here I am yet again at Columbia!
In speaking to other linguists-turned-lawyers, we’ve learned that language and the law often intersect in interesting ways. How did studying linguistics inform your decision to attend law school?
Without a doubt, law and language cross paths with surprising frequency. Exhibit A: Pulsifer v. United States is a Supreme Court case about the meaning of the word “and” in a statute. As for me personally, I’m not sure I was so savvy as you all are at that stage in my (continuing) education. I applied to law schools and doctoral linguistics programs simultaneously. I was viewing law school as a professional endeavor and linguistics as an academic one, separate but both worthy. For various reasons, I ended up going only to law school rather than doing a joint JD-PhD. And when I got to law school, I realized the rift I had in my head was silly. The truth was that law can be academic and linguistics professional. I quickly realized that language and linguistics have a lot to say in and about law, which has led me to merge the two in my work. And I don’t count myself out of pursuing a PhD in linguistics in the future.
That is a long way of saying that honestly, at the time, I didn’t think linguistics was leading me to law. But in hindsight, I am confident the same itch I get when I want to suss out a coherent description of a rule of derivational morphology or phonology is the same one I get when I’m faced with a legal puzzle.
How did linguistics coursework prepare you for law school, and for your career?
Many liken the law to learning a language. And that’s maybe half right, but it’s a useful analogy. Some of it is new lexical items—respondeat superior or habeas corpus—and some of it is false friends. (I promise “negligence” and “with prejudice” don’t mean what you might think they do!) And much of what lawyers do is a lot like what a linguist does. From previously decided cases, we are to come up with a general rule that explains it. And that inductive method is very much like the linguistic puzzles you know so well. One place where the analogy breaks down is that law is really many languages. Linguists have to roll with the fact that some languages have nominative-accusative alignment, others Ergative-Absolutive alignment, and others something in between. And lawyers must learn that “assault” in tort law is not necessarily the same thing as “assault” in criminal law. The methodology of looking for patterns and an eye for context sensitivity were useful.
Linguistics was also useful for seeing the law behind the law. Just as you learn in socio- and historical linguistics that linguistic rules are distributed along socially salient lines, legal outcomes are as well. Having the ability to see both the rules and the ways the rules cut across society are invaluable, if for nothing else than your own sanity.
When it comes to my career, since I have chosen to use linguistics in my academic work, I am regularly consulting academic work in linguistics. And since I do and have done pro bono work in the immigration space, language skills have been invaluable, whether that is consulting with clients in languages I do speak or knowing how to quickly figure out why something might be being misunderstood in languages I don’t.
As an undergraduate, you were not planning to go into law. How did you come to this career? Are there ‘types’ of people you would recommend this field to? Or some you may dissuade from pursuing this field?
I came to it from two desires—one to know and one to do. I knew nothing about law in college, except in the most abstract sense from my political theory courses. I got a small taste from my upper-level political science-economics seminar, which did some economic analysis of law, but this was still not so much a lawyer’s law. Circa 2019 to 2020, I was seeing this brooding leviathan of “law” affecting the world and people close to me in ways I did not understand, and I wanted to. Plus, I thought that law would give me a way of doing things in the world that I would not be able to do otherwise. I now can and do represent noncitizens and immigrants in court, putting my language skills to use.
If I were to typologize who law is good for, I would mainly say that one should (probably) not go to law school if they don’t want to be a lawyer. It varies by school, of course, and there are now some programs that have something akin to PhDs in law, but most are, by and large, professional schools that send people into the profession of law. If you are only interested in the knowing and not the doing, the eye of the legal academic needle is very small. But when it comes to the coursework, if you are the type of person who likes a linguistics problem set or the close reading associated with discourse analysis, there’s a lot in law school you’ll love. It should also be noted that there are oodles of kinds of lawyers. Some stand up in court like in the movies. But some only write briefs, some negotiate deals, some write contracts, others help people plan their estates, others do taxes, and, of course, some teach. Many lawyers would never dream of going anywhere near a podium and dread those courses in law school. I would recommend doing some research and seeing if any of the myriad legal careers appeal to you, and reach out to people doing it.
You are currently an Academic Fellow here at Columbia. What are you researching/teaching? What appealed to you about this opportunity?
I teach Legal Research and Writing to LLM students. LLM students are mostly international students who are lawyers in their home countries and come to the United States to do a one-year program that allows them to practice here. The contours of my research agenda are still coming into focus, but I am currently working on a project related to the Supreme Court’s so-called “shadow docket,” the role the federal courts play in making law for the country, and how we should interpret court opinions. My other work has looked at Black English in the law as well as how courts should interpret vague or ambiguous language in treaties, statutes, and contracts. The opportunity is a great one for preparing to go on the academic job market in law, which I will do come autumn.
How does it feel to be back on campus?
It’s surreal and fun to be back on campus. I’ve gone back to places I used to enjoy being (I love the giant glass windows of the NoCo Joe’s Coffee), but I’ve also gotten to know the law school and other places I never really went to before a lot better.
Where do you hope to go from here?
The plan is to go on the job market for legal academia this autumn and start a tenure-track position at a law school in 2027. Wish me luck…
You’ve had some experience working in the legal field (aside from all your experience with research). How does legal research differ from a job in law (like a clerkship)? Which do you prefer?
I would say that there are many types of jobs that do “legal research” broadly defined. A transactional lawyer might do legal research to determine how different drafting choices in a contract will be interpreted by a court down the line if there’s a dispute. And a litigator might mine the cases looking for the ones that put their client on the best possible footing in a live dispute. Much of my job clerking, for example, involved legal research to help the judge determine what the law was—insofar as it existed. Academic legal research has a slightly broader goal, which might include argumentation about what the law should be or different ways of understanding the law, though, of course, part of that involves understanding the present law. I like both, but tend to prefer some of the freedom that comes from academic legal research, where I might compare and contrast different legal rules, think about their origins, and the like.
What would you say to current linguistics undergraduates who are interested in law school? How can they prepare themselves, and how might they incorporate their linguistics studies into a legal career?
I would say that your linguistics training will certainly be helpful, in more ways than you might expect. And when it comes to preparing for law school, I would not attempt to “learn the law” in advance. Law school is as much about learning your professor as it is about learning the law since so much is contested, not to mention changing. When I learned constitutional law, affirmative action was legal, and there was a constitutional right to an abortion. And the form of a law school exam is often to elicit a hard case where you are supposed to be able to articulate the best argument for both resolutions. I would prepare by making sure you are a healthy and happy human being so that the stressors law school brings don’t burn you out. If you do well in your linguistics program at Columbia, you are more than capable of doing well in law school.
In my experience, it was almost inevitable that my linguistics training came up. Judges sometimes uncritically cite Strunk & White and (even more diabolically) Urban Dictionary as authority on English. When you read cases or draft contracts or work with people with lower English proficiency, your linguistics skills will come up. And, if you are more academically inclined, certainly professors would not mind having research assistants with linguistics background! How you incorporate linguistics into your career will depend on your trajectory, but no matter where you are in law, you will be able to. I would again recommend looking into the legal careers that interest you earlier rather than later and talking to people in those areas to see what life is like on the ground (or in the trenches if you like). And you are all welcome to shoot me an email!
You’ll be speaking at the Dressler Colloquium next Friday, April 24th (Hamilton 702; 4PM – all are welcome!). Can you give us a quick “elevator pitch” to pique our interest for next Friday?
Three things, two involving fish. (1) The Supreme Court once decided a fish is not a “tangible object.” (2) A court in California once decided that a bee is a “fish.” (3) I think both these decisions were eminently reasonable.
