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Full-Text Articles in Law
Law As Language (Reviewing Peter M. Tiersma, Legal Language (1999)), Francis J. Mootz Iii
Law As Language (Reviewing Peter M. Tiersma, Legal Language (1999)), Francis J. Mootz Iii
Scholarly Works
The jacket of Professor Peter Tiersma’s book Legal Language illustrates the problem inherent in a linguistic study of legal language. The jacket features a legal document in fine print, with an overlay of a magnifying glass that brings some of the indecipherable words into focus. The problem, of course, is that a scholar conducting a linguistic study of language does not have access to a distinct "magnifying glass" that can posit language as an object; he can study language only with language.
Tiersma attempts to avoid the most difficult problems of self-reference that follow from the "interpretive turn" in social …