Join the Columbia Linguistics Program for our final Spring Dressler Colloquium!
Our own linguistics alum Alexander Walker (CC ’19; Harvard Law ’23) will teach us about:
Linguistics in the Law:
Language Contact and Interpretation
Friday, April 24
Hamilton 702, 4 PM
The law abounds with questions that sound like linguistic questions: What does the Constitution or a statute mean? What happens when someone gets misinterpreted because of the language variety they speak? How do judges apply law from foreign countries? When do people get translators? In this talk, I will introduce the intersection of law and linguistics focusing on (1) language contact and (2) legal interpretation. For language contact, we will explore case studies of misinterpretation of minority language varieties as well as lesser-known facts about the law’s historical and present linguistic diversity. Knowledge of these areas helps make sense of issues in immigration and due process law. For legal interpretation, we will discuss how lawyers argue about the meaning of the Constitution and statutes. This requires understanding current theories like “originalism,” “living constitutionalism,” and “textualism,” but we must also look to what some argue are the future of legal interpretation—corpus analysis and AI.
