Clark Cunningham '75 told an audience of about 40 students, faculty and members of the community that linguistics can make positive contributions to the creation and application of laws, at a lecture given in the Rockefeller Center yesterday.
Many laws could be clarified and client-lawyer relationships improved if judges and lawyers relied more on linguistics -- the study of the nature and structure of speech, Cunningham said.
He compared the lawyer-client relationship to a bus driver-passenger relationship.
"A dominant approach of lawyers is that they assume that as long as they get the client to the destination, the driving doesn't matter," said Cunningham, himself a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.
To illustrate this point, he cited an Australian case in which a woman was convicted of killing her husband. But it was later discovered that her spouse abused her, and she acted in defense of herself and her young niece.
Linguistics played a large role in the obscure nature of the case. According to the woman's aboriginal background, it was not traditional to share personal information with anyone, including lawyers, unless the other party reciprocated the information. The woman's lawyers were not aware of this glitch in her defense while preparing for the trial, thus leading to her conviction.
Cunningham said that this approach to law is often ineffective
In an effort to improve lawyer-client relationships, he is currently involved in a project of recording and analyzing linguistics in interviews between lawyers and their clients. He then gives lawyers feedback.
There are different ways to interpret commonly-used words, he added.
Cunningham recently conducted research on word usage, and interviewed people to determine the meaning of the word "use" and "enterprise." He found that different people, all competent English speakers, use the words differently.
"Language itself is fundamentally indeterminate," he said.
He suggested that attorneys practicing law, congressmen constructing laws and judges ruling on the law should all consider linguistics one of the powerful tools they can use.
"I think that the role of linguistics could be really quite helpful to the legislators looking at what I think is kind of an art, which is how to use language in ways both specific and general at the same time," Cunningham said.
