Law, Language, and Science

Law, Language, and Science

Author: Diana Jeater

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2006-12-30

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 031309439X

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This book examines the mentalities of various communities within a district of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Focusing in particular on white administrators and missionaries in the Melsetter District, it combines linguisitc/lexical analysis with historical interpretation, in an attempt to reconstruct what whites and Africans actually meant by the words and practices they used in interactions with each other. Jeater provides a detailed study of translation work in Mt Selinda, an evangelical mission; it also examines formal and informal court hearings, to contrast the perceptions and meanings ascribed to cases by white adjudicators and by African participants. This leads into an initial attempt to map out the birth of ethnography in Southern Rhodesia and to contrast it with anthropology in South Africa. By the 1920s, Africans' expertise in their own languages and culture had been usurped by self-referential white linguists and ethnographers. This account suggests that there is a tendency among archive-oriented historians to overestimate how far white missionaries and administrators really understood what Africans said and did. In addition to making a contribution to our empirical knowledge of Zimbabwe's history, the book focuses on how and why investigators first began to make claims to such knowledge. It urges those studying African history to be self-reflective about their practice, examining the historical roots of their claims to expertise. such claims


Science at the Bar

Science at the Bar

Author: Sheila Jasanoff

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1997-09-30

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780674793033

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Issues spawned by the headlong pace of developments in science and technology fill the courts. The realm of the law is sometimes at a loss—constrained by its own assumptions and practices, Jasanoff suggests. This book exposes American law’s long-standing involvement in constructing, propagating, and perpetuating myths about science and technology.


Legal Meanings

Legal Meanings

Author: Janet Giltrow

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-09-07

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 3110721007

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Edited by Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein, the Foundations in Language and Law series aims beyond the traditional surveys of scholarship in law and language. Monographs in the series will provide foundational materials - theoretical, methodological, critical, practical - to advance study of important topics in the field. And even as each volume engages conceptually with current scholarship in the area, it presents original research which breaks new ground and indicates future directions for scholarship in law and language. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.


Law, Language, and Science

Law, Language, and Science

Author: Diana Jeater

Publisher: Praeger

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780325071084

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Examines the mentalities and translation practices of communities within a district of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in the early 20th century, especially as they related to the legal system and missionary work.


Sexual Science and the Law

Sexual Science and the Law

Author: Richard Green

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780674802681

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A rape victim charges that pornography caused her attacker to become a sex offender. A lesbian mother fights for custody of her child. A transsexual pilot is fired by a commercial airline after undergoing sex change and sues for sex discrimination. A homosexual is denied employment because of sexual orientation. A woman argues that her criminal behavior should be excused because she suffers from premenstrual syndrome. The law has much to say about sexual behavior, but what it says is rarely influenced by the findings of social science research over recent decades. This book focuses for the first time on the dynamic interplay between sexual science and legal decisionmaking. Reflecting the author's wide experience as a respected sex researcher, expert witness, and lawyer, Sexual Science and the Law provides valuable insights into some of the most controversial social and sexual topics of our time. Drawing on an exhaustive knowledge of the relevant research and citing extensively from case law and court transcripts, Richard Green demonstrates how the work of sexual science could bring about a transformation in jurisprudence, informing the courts in their deliberations on issues such as sexual privacy, homosexuality, prostitution, abortion, pornography, and sexual abuse. In each case he considers, Green shows how the law has been shaped by social science or impoverished by reliance on conjecture and received wisdom. He examines the role of sexual science in legal controversy, its analysis of human motivation and behavior, and its use by the courts in determining the relative weight to be given the desires of the individual, the standards of society, and the power of the state in limiting sexual autonomy. Unprecedented in its portrayal of sexuality in a legal context, this scholarly but readable book will interest and educate professional and layperson alike--those lawyers, judges, sex educators, therapists, patients, and citizens who find themselves standing nonplussed at the meeting place of morality and behavior.


Latin as the Language of Science and Learning

Latin as the Language of Science and Learning

Author: Philipp Roelli

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-11-22

Total Pages: 659

ISBN-13: 3110745836

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This book investigates the role of the Latin language as a vehicle for science and learning from several angles. First, the question what was understood as ‘science’ through time and how it is named in different languages, especially the Classical ones, is approached. Criteria for what did pass as scientific are found that point to ‘science’ as a kind of Greek Denkstil based on pattern-finding and their unbiased checking. In a second part, a brief diachronic panorama introduces schools of thought and authors who wrote in Latin from antiquity to the present. Latin’s heydays in this function are clearly the time between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. Some niches where it was used longer are examined and reasons sought why Latin finally lost this lead-role. A third part seeks to define the peculiar characteristics of scientific Latin using corpus linguistic approaches. As a result, several types of scientific writing can be identified. The question of how to transfer science from one linguistic medium to another is never far: Latin inherited this role from Greek and is in turn the ancestor of science done in the modern vernaculars. At the end of the study, the importance of Latin science for modern science in English becomes evident.


Just Words

Just Words

Author: John M. Conley

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-05-10

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 022648453X

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Is it “just words” when a lawyer cross-examines a rape victim in the hopes of getting her to admit an interest in her attacker? Is it “just words” when the Supreme Court hands down a decision or when business people draw up a contract? In tackling the question of how an abstract entity exerts concrete power, Just Words focuses on what has become the central issue in law and language research: what language reveals about the nature of legal power. John M. Conley, William M. O'Barr, and Robin Conley Riner show how the microdynamics of the legal process and the largest questions of justice can be fruitfully explored through the field of linguistics. Each chapter covers a language-based approach to a different area of the law, from the cross-examinations of victims and witnesses to the inequities of divorce mediation. Combining analysis of common legal events with a broad range of scholarship on language and law, Just Words seeks the reality of power in the everyday practice and application of the law. As the only study of its type, the book is the definitive treatment of the topic and will be welcomed by students and specialists alike. This third edition brings this essential text up to date with new chapters on nonverbal, or “multimodal,” communication in legal settings and law, language, and race.


Sociology of Law as the Science of Norms

Sociology of Law as the Science of Norms

Author: Håkan Hydén

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-28

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1000533107

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This book proposes the study of norms as a method of explaining human choice and behaviour by introducing a new scientific perspective. The science of norms may here be broadly understood as a social science which includes elements from both the behavioural and legal sciences. It is given that a science of norms is not normative in the sense of prescribing what is right or wrong in various situations. Compared with legal science, sociology of law has an interest in the operational side of legal rules and regulation. This book develops a synthesizing social science approach to better understand societal development in the wake of the increasingly significant digital technology. The underlying idea is that norms as expectations today are not primarily related to social expectations emanating from human interactions but come from systems that mankind has created for fulfilling its needs. Today the economy, via the market, and technology via digitization, generate stronger and more frequent expectations than the social system. By expanding the sociological understanding of norms, the book makes comparisons between different parts of society possible and creates a more holistic understanding of contemporary society. The book will be of interest to academics and researchers in the areas of sociology of law, legal theory, philosophy of law, sociology and social psychology.


The Law-Science Chasm

The Law-Science Chasm

Author: Cedric Charles Gilson

Publisher: Quid Pro Books

Published: 2012-11-01

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1610271459

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"THE LAW-SCIENCE CHASM" is a socio-legal study that takes seriously the varying approaches to science that physicians and scientists use, as compared to legal actors such as judges and lawyers. Offering a way to mediate and translate their different perspectives and assumptions, Gilson uses sociological and philosophical methodologies to explain each discipline to the other. "Gilson's book takes seriously the idea of the autopoietic closure of society's communicative subsystems and works out the consequences in particular for science and law. This analysis both lends support to the credibility of the approach adopted and sheds light on the problems and the direction in which potential solutions might lie.... The book consequently makes an important contribution not only to the literature dealing with the relationship between science and law but also to the literature dealing with the application of autopoietic systems theory to tangible concerns. This book is therefore of clear significance to those continuing to wrestle with the challenges thrown up by science for law and policy even when the spotlight of public attention is directed elsewhere." -- JOHN PATERSON, Professor of Law, University of Aberdeen (from the Foreword) Part of the new "Dissertation Series" from Quid Pro Books.


Law and Language

Law and Language

Author: Harold J. Berman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-08-08

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 110703342X

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Berman's long-lost tract shows how properly negotiated, translated and formalised legal language is essential to fostering peace and common understanding.