How does multilingual law-making work?

In this podcast interview, Alexandra Grey explores multilingual law-making with Karen McAuliffe, a Professor of Law and Language at Birmingham Law School in the UK. The conversation is about the important legal opinions delivered by the Advocates General at the European Court of Justice, and the effects of Advocates General drafting those opinions in their second or third language and with multilingual support staff.

This conversation builds on a chapter written by Karen McAuliffe, Liana Muntean & Virginia Mattioli in the book Researching the European Court of Justice: Methodological Shifts and Law’s Embeddedness, edited by Mikael Rask Madsen, Fernanda Nicola and Antoine Vauchez and published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Karen mentions the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network. You can subscribe to the Network’s listserv and read member profiles on Language on the Move. She also mentions iCourts, which is the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for International Courts and Governance, and the Language, Culture and Justice Hub at Bard College.

If you enjoyed this show, say hi to Alexandra on LinkedIn and to Karen on BlueSky @profkmca.bsky.social. Also, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice 🙂

Transcript

 

Alexandra Grey: Welcome to Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. I’m Alex Grey, and I’m a research fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Technology in Sydney. My guest today is Professor Karen McAuliffe. Karen is a Professor of Law and Language, and a Birmingham Fellow, at Birmingham Law School in the UK. We’re going to talk about doing research that pools together, law and linguistics, a pet topic, a key interest for both of us. Karen, welcome to the show.

Karen McAuliffe: Thank you so much. It’s lovely to be here. Always a delight to talk about my research.

Alexandra: what we’ve decided to do today is to cover both a specific part of your recent research, and then to talk more generally about the research that you do and how you manage to straddle law and linguistics. But before we get into any of those specifics, let’s just first get to know you a little. You’ve got a really unusual job title. I just read it out. How did you come to be professor not only of law but of language at the same time?

Karen: Well, it’s an interesting story. It’s not a very linear journey to it. So, I originally studied my undergraduate degree was a common and civil law degree at Queen’s University, Belfast. As I’m Irish, I should add, I work in the UK. For anybody listening who wonders why I don’t have a British accent, that is why. So, I studied in Northern Ireland, in Queens University of Belfast, and also at Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. So, I studied Northern Irish UK law and Belgian law and the Belgian law part of the degree was obviously in French. So, so I did this dual qualification, dual language degree. And when I graduated, to be honest, I didn’t really think very hard about my career, or what I wanted to do while I was at university, and after graduation I did a– what’s called a competition to work as a lawyer linguist in the European Union and the European institutions, the EU institutions. And so I got a job as a lawyer linguist in at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. Worked there for a while. I began to realize that I was a bit more interested in thinking about what I was doing than actually doing it. So, I returned to Academia to do a Phd. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to do a Phd. And I went back to Queens to do it, actually back to Belfast, and this time not to the Law School, but to the Institute of Governance.  While I was working in Luxembourg as a lawyer linguist, I just became fascinated with the job that I was doing. Insofar as  you know, my job was to try to translate judgments that had been drafted in French into English in a way that they would have the same legal effects  in Ireland and the UK then – which was part of the EU back then – as they would, you know, anywhere else in in the EU, and that intersection between law language and translation really, really fascinated me. So that was the topic of my Phd. It was on legal translation at the European Court of Justice, specifically, and in that Phd, I did a lot of I guess what you call it socio legal research.

I ended up staying. I stayed in Academia and in 2016, I moved to the University of Birmingham as a Birmingham Fellow, which was very exciting, really lovely post to get. I had previously got some large grants from the European Commission, so European Research Council Grants, including one, it’s called a Starter grant, which is like a 5 year project to look at law and language in the European Union. And when I got my Chair it was a named chair, and I was allowed to choose the Chair, so it was a Professor of Law and Language. That’s how I got here, I guess.

Alexandra: It’s marvelous to hear, Karen, because I think there are listeners out there, there are academics who email me, who say, ‘Look, I’m interested in law and language but until I, you know, found someone else doing that online, I had no idea that it was a career path’.

Karen: It was all very serendipitous, really, and not as linear as I’ve made it sound there.

Alexandra: But we’re going to make it sound even more linear because you’ve created a perfect segue to the specific piece of work that we’re going to talk about today. It’s a chapter you wrote and published in 2022, along with Liana Muntean and Virginia Mattioli.  It’s called Through the Lens of Language; Uncovering the collaborative nature of Advocates General’s Opinions. I’ll put the full link in the show notes with the book that it’s from. But in this chapter you’re talking about a study where we meet lawyer linguists, exactly the role that you yourself once held and the kinds of people who work alongside them, or for whom they work at the European Court of Justice. The Advocates General, we hear a little bit about the judges. We hear about another type of staff member called a référendaire, who works alongside the Advocates General. And this chapter then gives us an insight into how those people are working together and doing exactly that interaction of law, language and translation that you’ve spoken about.

What I wanted to talk about with this chapter is a little bit your specific findings. But then also to talk more generally about what this chapter is saying in terms of method and how to do research that draws together law and language. So, we’ll come back to that more general question in a minute. But first we’ll focus on the specific context. And I’m just going to read out a little quote from the Chapter, too, to give a bit of background to listeners who might know nothing about the European Court of Justice.

Karen: Right.

Alexandra: Early in the chapter you and your co-authors begin by explaining that in ‘The EU legal order, with twenty-four official languages, integrated in twenty-seven member state legal systems, is linguistically, as well as substantively, unique.’ So, this is a really unusual legal system in many ways, I guess, but particularly here you’re highlighting how multilingual it is. And you’ve done a lot of analysis on how this multilingualism impacts on the development of law in the EU in this chapter but in other works as well. And so, this chapter is specifically a case study about the European Court of Justice, and even more specifically about the role of the Advocate General in presenting legal opinions to that court and the languages that Advocates General use to draft those opinions.

Karen: I might go back a bit further, if you don’t mind. I’m very aware that your listenership is very international, um, and so there may be people listening that don’t know anything at all about the European Court of Justice and how it works. So, the first thing to point out about this particular chapter is that I’m not talking about the judges. The Advocates General are separate. They’re not judges. So, the court itself, it’s seated in Luxembourg. I guess you could call it like the Supreme Court when it comes to European Union law. There’s two sections to it. There’s a General Court, which is the lower court, and then the European Court of Justice, which is the higher court, and I’m focusing on the higher court in this paper.

The court delivers judgments in 24 languages but it works in French. So internally the court works in French, but it delivers judgments in 24 languages. Each case that comes before the court will have what’s called a language of procedure or a language of the case. So, for example, if a Greek court um sent a question to the European Court of Justice for interpretation on a piece of EU law, the language of the case would be Greek, so the question would come to the European Court of Justice in Greek. It would be translated into French. It’ll be worked on within the Court in French, and then the judgment that is delivered, the first version of the judgment that’s drafted, will be in French, and then it’ll be translated into all the other languages. But the authentic version, the version that the judges sign will be the Greek version.

So that’s the first thing about judgments. The second thing is that they are collegiate documents. So, the deliberations of judges are secret. We never know, you know, where compromises might lie in the text of a judgment. They’re a very particular type of document. I’ve described them in in a previous paper as sort of Lego-like building blocks that are put together to make the judgement. The Court doesn’t engage with sort of legal reasoning in a very in-depth way. It answers the questions before it, and a large part of that is because the deliberations are secret. We don’t know what happens in there. Because of the nature of these judgments, because they are collegiate because of the deliberations are secret because there’s no dissenting judgments, you have these members of the court called Advocates General and this is borrowed from the French administrative law system.

So the Advocate General’s job is to deliver an opinion, a reasoned opinion on the case, to guide the court in its judgment and back in the early days of the court, the advocates general delivered opinions in every case but as workload grew, and as members of the European Union grew, you know that just became untenable. And so nowadays opinions, advocates, generals, opinions are delivered in sort of important cases, constitutionally important cases or cases where a Member States requests it specifically. And the Advocate’s general opinion, first of all, historically, was written in the language of the Advocate General. So, you know, there are 11 Advocates General, and there are a number of permanent Advocates General, as in there will be there’s a French permanent Advocate General, there’s a Polish permanent Advocate General, and then the others are rotated among the sort of smaller – in inverted commas – EU Member States. So, these people, they deliver opinions, and historically, that was in their own language. And so that’s the first thing. And the second thing is, the Advocate General can deal with anything they want in their opinion they don’t have to just stick to the questions the parties have asked. They don’t just have to stick to the things that have been raised by parties in the case, and you know, they can act almost as a sparring partner in that they can force the Court to engage in dialogue on certain concepts of EU law. And so any scholar of EU law will tell you that the judgments of the Court, while you know you can look at the judgment of the Court, and you can think about well, you know, how has the court applied that? Or how has the court interpreted the law here, where you really find the interesting dialogue and conversation about where EU law might be going is the is the opinion of the Advocate General. The Court of Justice of the European Unio is famously or infamously known for sort of creating the legal order of the EU. So you know this. The narrative is that that this EU legal order wasn’t created really by treaties and legislation. It was. It was done, you know, by the European Court of Justice kind of reading gaps in those treaties, and then creating these constitutional type principles.

But every one of those big constitutional type principles of EU law was fist seen in an Advocate General’s opinion. So, they’re really, really important in terms of EU scholarship. Now, they’re not binding on the court, but the court must take account of them when delivering the judgment.

Alexandra: They’re incredibly influential on the Court itself, but also influential on everyone else who’s teaching law.

Karen: Exactly. And so a lot of the work scholarship that had been done on the role of the Advocate General, when they talked about the opinion itself scholars would often point out that the fact that the Advocate General is writing in his or her own language first language makes a difference to how persuasive they can be. And so to finally come round to your question: in 2004 there was this sort of mega enlargement of the European Union. 10 new Member States joined in 2004, and then another 3 in 2007. And so what was happening was as Member States joined their languages got added to the list of EU official languages. So, prior to 2004 there were only 11 – only, I say! There were 11 official languages and then in– between 2004 and 2007, that number then rose to 24.

So two things with that. First of all, on a practical level, if you have to provide, if you have to do direct translation between 11 languages, now, I should have written this down beforehand, so don’t judge my math, but I think that it’s 52 combinations, I think. But if you are doing direct translation between 24 languages, that goes up to, I think it’s 552 or 554.

Alexandra: Wow!

Karen: It’s a lot. So in 2004, the European Court of Justice and the other EU institutions introduced a ‘pivot translation system’, they call it, which is relay translation. And the way it works in the court is that certain languages are assigned to– There are 5 pivot languages. So French is a pivot language for all of the other languages, because French is the working language of the Court, and then you have English, German, Spanish, Italian, and now, since 2018, Polish as well. So they’re the pivot languages, and all the other languages are assigned to a pivot language. So, to give you an example, what that means is, if a question or a case comes from a Lithuanian court or from Lithuania, it will be translated into English and then translated from English into the other languages. So, it’s sort of pivoted through relayed translation.

Alexandra: And so what is happening there to the role of the Advocate General, those people now have to start actually drafting and presenting their opinions in a pivot language. Am I right?

Karen: Yeah. Now, the interesting thing is that it’s not — it’s a convention rather than a requirement. They don’t have to. It was introduced early—the person who is, I believe he’s now Registrar of the Court, I think he’s still there, Alfredo Colon Escobar. He took over as Director of the Translation Directorate at the Court. And he introduced this system. But he was also thinking of what’s to come, and I mentioned earlier that Advocates Generals, they rotate. So you’ve got your permanent Advocate Generals, and then you have a number of Advocate generals that rotate countries. And so the court was aware and the director of the of the translation directorate was aware that in a few years you would have a Slovenian and a Slovakian Advocate General and if you had to wait for the translation to be pivoted from Slovenian into whatever the pivot language for Slovenian is back into another language, you’re adding a lot of time onto the process. So so this was all introduced for sort of for practical purposes, for expediency’s sake. And so in 2004 this convention was introduced, whereby Advocate Generals were asked to draft in one of the pivot languages of the court.

The reality of that is that you have the permanent Advocate Generals can continue to draft in their own language because they are the pivot languages of the Court. Other Advocate Generals have to choose to draft in in one of these languages, and they usually draft in English.

Alexandra: And, as you point out in your chapter, it’s not just they draft, as in, it’s not just the Advocate themselves. They have this whole team of a référendaire, who’s like a research assistant sort of position, maybe I’m underselling it; a lawyer linguist, you know. So actually, one of the things I found so interesting in your chapter, the data really shows how it’s a collaborative document, even though only one Advocate General sort of gets to put their name on it.

Karen: Yeah, so this is, this is the other very interesting thing about, I think, about this chapter in particular, is that again, historically. And the literature always talks about individual Advocates General and their opinions, but they’ve always worked in teams. So each advocate general has, I think, nowadays they have 4 référendaires. And a référendaire is similar to a clerk in the US System.

So there are lawyers and they will produce, like the initial drafts or the structures. It will differ from Advocate General to Advocate General. Some are much more hands on, some are much more hands off, but it is absolutely this this team effort. And that has always been the case. But that process remained invisible. And then all the literature talked about was the persuasiveness of this one person, this one very important person, the Advocate General. So what we were able to do in the research for this paper was sort of uncover or shine a light on on this process that’s happening behind the scenes and also shine a light on an additional role that only exists because of this linguistic convention. And that is, in certain cases some Advocate Generals or the teams of some Advocate Generals that the Chambers of some Advocate Generals will require what’s called ‘linguistic assistance’.

So because their référendaire may not be of English mother tongue, and they’re drafting in English, for example. And so what then they have is this wholly invisible part of the process from the outside, of a lawyer linguist coming in and providing what’s called linguistic assistance, and that linguistic assistance, again, will differ depending on who has written an opinion. It could be merely proofreading, there might be no need for linguistic assistance at all. Somebody might be very fluent in English, or, you know, in French, or whatever language they’ve chosen. But we’ll say English. But in other cases that linguistic assistance is much, much more than just proofreading. It’s it’s a rewriting in in certain cases, or a reframing of certain concepts. And so there’s much more of that legal creative work happening there. And that role of that sort of lawyer linguist as the linguistic assistant in the production of Advocate General’s opinions is something that, you know, just wasn’t known about outside of the Court or outside of the EU institutions, certainly not within EU scholarship, before we were able to do this research. So that was very exciting, very interesting.

Alexandra: It was interesting to me, not only to hear about that, but the way you found that out. So you and your co-authors in this chapter are very clear about what sorts of methods are allowing you to see what sorts of information, or what sort of behind the scenes reality might otherwise be invisible. And one of the key ways you do it is to interview not just the Advocates General, but the référendaires, the lawyer linguists, and in another, not in this chapter, in another part of the bigger study, the judges themselves. And what I found really interesting is that while, on the one hand, these interviews shine a light on the reality of this collaborative, interlingual production, on the other hand, what the people are overtly saying, and I’ll summarize, I’ll use a quote that you have in the chapter sort of summarizing the perspective of many interviewees: you say ‘language and substance appear to be distinct and separate things. Any overt acknowledgement of the impact of language on their work seems to be seen as undermining the quality of that work’. So even in the interviews, that invisibility is sort of perpetuated.

Karen: Absolutely. Yeah. And what was very interesting was when we when we coded the interviews the judges, the Advocate Generals for this paper, the référendaires, they all said, ‘oh, like it has no impact. The language that I’m working in has absolutely no impact on the substance that I’m producing, or the way that I’m thinking’. And then, in the same breath they will say, ‘Oh, but of course I think totally differently in my own language’. And I think there’s a quote we actually use in that paper, where they say, ‘my French colleague might come to a different conclusion’.

And what was very interesting to us was that you know, in the context of the interview, you come out of the interview and go, ‘Okay, they don’t think language is that important at all, really’. And at the same time when you go to code the interviews they’re saying this. They know it. It’s there in the back of their mind, and the Advocate Generals themselves will say, ‘Oh, no, no! My voice comes through, no matter what language I’m writing in, it’s my voice’. The fact that that goes against all research in sort of translation and linguistics is neither here nor there. But you know this is what they’re saying, ‘my voice, nothing’s different’. Everything is fine, it’s all the same, and in the same breath, they’ll say, ‘but it’s really important for me that I have a francophone, or that I have an English speaker in my chambers’. So again, they’re acknowledging it. And also the judges, when we interviewed them, said something along the lines of, ‘look, any EU lawyer can learn the law. What we need, what we need are people who are good at languages’. And they rate the linguistic capabilities of the lawyers that they’re hiring to be in their chambers, to be in their teams, higher. They say these things that don’t match up with how they’re acting, and that’s really interesting when you’re coding the interview to go.

Alexandra: One way you, you deal with that in this paper is, you know, to take that sort of reflective stance about the interviews. You don’t just take them at face value, but that’s not a reason not to do interviews. It’s very useful to find out some of these processes, but also to find out that sort of discursive production of the importance of just one voice. But then, what you do in this chapter is, you use an entirely different kind of data and method, and that is corpus linguistics, to then triangulate or compare, if you like, to show just how different these opinions can be depending on whether it’s the mother tongue language or another language that’s used for drafting.

Karen: You know, I am coming from this very privileged position, where I knew that the lawyer linguists were doing that job so I could. I could come up with this hypothesis quite easily, because it seemed to me that the opinions of Advocates General were becoming more synthetic, and more Lego-like, in in the same way. They were coming closer to judgments stylistically. And I was interested in that. So, I suppose I started with this hypothesis: you know I think these opinions are coming closer and closer stylistically to what the judgments are. And if that is the case, then then what’s the point of the opinion? So that’s where I started from, and we did the interviews. And then we did this corpus linguistics analysis on the actual texts themselves, the opinions themselves. And now I didn’t do– I’m not a corpus linguist, so I didn’t do the analysis. Virginia Mattioli did that analysis, and it’s all explained in detail in the paper. And Virginia and I have, I’m pretty sure, on Youtube, there are some presentations that we’ve done where she goes into a lot of detail about what we did there. But basically we compared opinions drafted in somebody’s first language. So, you know, French language opinions, or English language opinions. Italian; I think we looked at as well. Language opinions drafted in a first language. And then we compared them with opinions – post 2004 opinions – that were drafted in the first language as well in a second or third language, a non-native language. And what we found was very interesting, because the interview data which we had done first, so the interview data was saying, right, these people who are drafting the opinions don’t think that anything has changed. They don’t think there’s been a change in voice. They don’t think there’s been a change in style of the opinions since 2004. However, somewhere in the back of their mind they’re acknowledging that language is very important and maybe influences the results that they get to or the end product in some way. But fundamentally they don’t think there’s been a difference. And the corpus linguistics analysis showed us that indeed there is a difference, and the corpus linguistics data shows that opinions are becoming more stylistically like judgments. But very interestingly, not just those opinions drafted in a non-native language. So so even the opinions of the permanent Advocate Generals, Advocates General, who are ostensibly drafting in their own language, their first language, are becoming more stylistically synthetic and less fluent. Not reading so much like a like an academic article, like a fluent article.

Alexandra: Like a a genre, is converging the two genres.

Karen: Hmm, yeah. Yeah. And that’s where it becomes very interesting then to work in an interdisciplinary because, Virginia, I hope– I don’t think she’ll mind me saying this, you know, she got these results and was very excited. She was going, ‘Yes, look! This convention, this convention change in 2004 has resulted in these opinions becoming more like judgments. Wonderful. We’re finished’. And we had a difficult time for a while, because, you know, I was saying, ‘Well but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s because of that convention change that there’s this, as you call it, like a shift in genre. There could be other reasons. There probably are multiple reasons to do with workload’. There are things that we can’t find out even through interviews, even if you did an anthropological study where you’re embedded in an institution like that. I think it will be very difficult to find out. For example, say you have an Advocate General who has a team of référendaires who are from various different places, but they will have been educated in multiple places. So, for example, myself, you know, I’ve been educated in Northern Ireland, in Belgium, in Greece. So all of that will impact the way that you work with language, the way that your mind works, the way that you reason. So things like that are difficult, if not impossible, to uncover. And so I think it’s very dangerous to rely on just one method to come to any kind of conclusion. So for us, what the corpus linguistics study showed was that our coding and our analysis of the interview data was true, because we had looked at the interview data, we had said, ‘Right, they think there’s no change or difference or relevance to them drafting in a language that’s not their own’. But our coding and our analysis of that interview data shows that actually there is. But we can’t prove that unless we look at the text themselves. And when we look at the text themselves and do the corpus linguistics analysis that corroborated what we were finding in the interview data. And it, I think, makes for a stronger argument at the end of the day.

Alexandra: It does. It reads really well to show, I think you call it multiple strategies in the toolbox, you know, if you use multiple methodological strategies at once you get greater rigor. But also you manage to, you know, to articulate very clearly in this chapter that that doesn’t mean that any one of those strategies by itself is without any flaw or weakness, you know. That’s the point of combining them to sort of balance each other. And then I like that you end the paper on a, if you like a forward-looking note, or on a big question that none of that data by itself can answer but maybe another strategy or another study can, and that is well, what is the effect in terms of persuasion? So not just on sort of reaching one or a different legal conclusion in the opinion itself. What does that actually do on the forward development of the law in terms of the persuasiveness or the room to sort of tease out new and different and creative and dissenting ideas. That’s being reduced, you know. That’s a longer term, and if you like more difficult question, I guess, to answer.

Karen: Yeah. But I think in the conclusions to that paper, you know one point that I’m trying to get across, I guess, is that the research question is really important. So, all of that is interesting. You know what I what I have just described. It’s very interesting, but it’s quite– It is just descriptive. You know this conversation I’m telling you: ‘This is what we did. And this is what happened. And isn’t it interesting?’ But I don’t see the point of doing research – I  mean, look, there is point in doing research just for interest’s sake – but in the context of legal research that has any kind of rigor I think you do need to be asking bigger, broader research questions from the outset. And I think that’s very important. And so we try in that paper to come back to those questions. Because yes, we observe all this stuff in the data. But so what?

Alexandra: Hehe.

Karen: And the ‘so what’ in this case will depend on what we think the opinion is for.

Alexandra: Yes.

Karen: And if the opinion, if the job of the opinion, as set out in the treaty, is to guide the Court in its decision in a particular case then maybe the converging of linguistic styles is not a bad thing, because you have the Court and the Advocates General speaking the same language, and everybody is working in their second or third language, anyway. And so you know, you have that phenomenon where everybody’s a non-native speaker. Nobody’s the eloquent speaker, and the power is is dissipated equally, you know, throughout. If that’s what the opinion is supposed to do then maybe it’s not so problematic, and that’s fine. But if the role of the opinion is, as EU scholars would claim, in fact, to persuade more widely and to explain how EU law is developing, and importantly, how it might develop. So one of the most important things about the Advocates General’s opinions are what it’s called prospective.

And it’s this idea of the direction, the future direction of EU law. And if that, in fact, is where the importance of these documents lie. And they lose their fluency, and they just become these very synthetic, Lego- like judgment style documents, they’re not really going to tell us anything about where the law is going to go, or how the law might develop. They’re not really going to engage in that sparring and that raising of dialogue between the Court and the Advocate Generals, and in that case that shift or convergence of linguistic styles does become more problematic, and it and it raises a bigger question about ‘well, what’s the role of the Advocate General then?’

So, for me coming back to an initial research question or understanding why you’re doing these methods. It’s very easy to get caught up in the method and excited about the method – and I mean I do it myself – enjoying doing the method. But I always think you really, really must come back to the ‘so what?’ question. And when I’m writing a paper, I often have a Post-It note stuck on my computer that just says ‘so what?’ because it’s a tough thing to come back to. But I do think it’s important.

Alexandra: Totally, and I think that’s a great tip for our listeners right now find that post it note.

Karen: Write a Post-It note: ‘so what?’

Alexandra: And this maybe brings me to a bigger question I was thinking of when I was reading your work, and it’s about how you make that ‘so what?” meaningful not just for other academics or people who might already be interested, but to a broader group of stakeholders, or, you know, would-be readers, and particularly working in the legal context, I was puzzling over this. You know, I myself also work in a legal context. You know, I came up as a lawyer, and then a linguist, have a similar background to you. And many of the stakeholders in the kinds of work that I encounter, or that you encounter, these are people who’ve probably studied legal research methods, way back, but those methods don’t center anything other than sort of finding and reading jurisprudence. So how do you convince these people that interviews, corpus analysis, other socio legal methods, other linguistic methods, how do you convince them to be trusting partners as participants in your study as they were here? Or, you know, having confidence in you as someone telling them an outcome or the knowledge that’s produced?

Karen: That’s a really good question. Sometimes, with great difficulty. Anybody who has engaged in interviews as a method will know that you are often interviewing people who don’t think very much of what you’re doing, or you as a person. In this case, again, as I say, I come from a very privileged position in this case, in that I have access to people at the Court. So I you know, I worked at the Court back in gosh! The early 2000s like 2000, 2002. And so people that I worked with and who stayed at the Court are now in very senior positions. And so I have access to that institution in a way that other people didn’t, or I had access, you know, in a way that other people didn’t. And people were willing to talk to me.

Then, in terms of yeah, in terms of the audience, like that is really tricky, and and it will depend like I, you will have different reactions. So you know, I’ve presented this type of work to audiences of lawyers, only lawyers, you know. And they’re like, ‘Well, that’s interesting. But it doesn’t really matter, because, you know, we’re making our money doing this, and and we need the law to be defined and definite, and not a malleable language like you’re saying it is.’

I’ve presented this type of work to audiences that are only linguists and linguists tend to be very focused on method, I find, and very interested in just observing these things that are happening. And they’re not always terribly interested in that big ‘So what?’ question.

And I, I suppose, finding your tribe, as anything in life, finding your tribe. The law and language community, I find, is is a very open, interested, curious, friendly community, generally. And this this paper is is published in a book that is specifically about new methods for studying law, studying European law or the European Court of Justice, I think, specifically, and that is the brainchild of researchers who are either permanently or temporarily based out of a center called iCourts, which is a Center for Excellence at the University of Copenhagen, and it’s a Centre of Excellence for international courts. And they are one of the pioneering institutes in law who have taken methods from the social sciences into law. And we actually had a book launch at the University of Luxembourg, and we had discussants from the European Court of Justice. So, we had judges and Advocates Generals discussing papers, which is kind of terrifying but also very fun, very pleasant.

So the Advocate General that that discussed this particular paper found it very interesting but remained unconvinced that their language, the language they were working in, affected their style, which is fine. That’s absolutely fine. People who are not scholars tend to think more in an ad hoc way, you know, than waiting to find out what the data says. And but interestingly, after that book launch, I had people from political science who had, who had come to the book launch. They all came up and went, ‘but these aren’t new methods, like we’ve been doing interviews for years, like, there’s nothing new about this.’ But the fact is that it’s new for Law.

Alexandra: Yes

Karen: Like you say, traditionally, this isn’t the type of stuff that has been done, particularly in European law where the focus has been much more doctrinal and sort of black letter.

Alexandra: Even in linguistics, you know what can be new is the combination of methods to answer one research question in one study. You know, you didn’t invent corpus linguistics, and I don’t think you’re pretending that you and your coauthors did.

Karen: God no!

Alexandra: You are making a really valid point, that it is quite novel and very useful to combine it with the interview method.

Karen: I like to think so. But I I think you know again to sort of try and answer your question a bit better, there are more of us now doing this type of work, which is wonderful. And so there are teams, you know: there’s my team at the University of Birmingham, there’s you guys, there are, you know, there, there are teams of more interdisciplinary people working on that interface between language and law, or just using language as a lens to interrogate other fields. And I think that’s the key. We just need more of us, more PhD students coming through – anybody want to come and do some more research with us? – and more, I guess, more freedom. And for, I guess, funding to do the type of projects that that we want to do. So, you also have to be convincing, depending on what you know the research academy looks like in your own country. You have to persuade a university or a funder that this is a good idea.

Alexandra: But, in fact, sometimes it can be that innovation of linguistics into law, you know, that can be the selling point that can be showing it’s new and worth funding. I’ll just jump in when you say, ‘and you guys’, I’ll just sort of put a little plug here. I think you mean the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers Network that Dr Laura Smith-Khan and I —

Karen McAuliffe: I do. It’s fantastic, and it’s so active. It’s wonderfully active and wonderfully supportive. It’s a it’s a wonderful research community that is somehow worldwide and feels very small and very supportive. There’s also the Language, Justice and Culture Hub.

Alexandra: Now based through Bard University.

Karen: Right. Yeah. And again, they’re all very, very welcoming communities and that isn’t a given, certainly not in the legal field.

Alexandra: It’s not, and that was Laura and my initial thinking, you know, sort of two things. First, we wanted a more welcoming space for ourselves and others. But also, back to what you were saying before, you know, a tide that lifts all boats, or, you know, a platform. It benefits each one of us to create a platform for the whole field.

Karen: And also, I think to create a field that’s rigorous, you know, in terms of scholarship because you sometimes– We can get very excited about building a new subfield and we get focused on our interesting data, and we don’t think about those bigger questions. And then the danger is that the subfield never becomes an established field because it doesn’t have [rigor] associated with it. So I think that’s important as well. And there’s lots of really interesting scholarship happening around the world. For a long time the law and language– the big names in law and language, we could list them on our on our hands, and they were white men.But there’s a lot more early career people, more people from the Global South that are doing really interesting and engaging work that is important to champion.

Alexandra: I totally agree. And so in the show notes, I’m going to put a link to a few other blogs where I think people can find those local and early career researchers in our law and linguistics field. But just to close the interview, I thought I might ask, where online can we find what you’re up to, or indeed in person, if you’ll be speaking.

Karen: I have no plans to speak right now. I have a period of study leave coming up, and I’m hoping that that is going to really get my creative juices flowing. I have been recently thinking about the construction of meaning in the context of multilingual legal reasoning. Jan Engberg, you may have had on this podcast before. He’s based out of Aarhus and he specializes in knowledge, communication, and the construction of meaning and has been doing some really interesting work recently about the construction of meaning in the context of comparative law and how we can’t–, we can’t get inside each other’s heads and fully understand what somebody is trying to communicate. And yet we manage to communicate. And yet global systems of law exist.

I’ve been working on the European Court of Justice for over 20 years, and haha! And I will always love it, and I don’t think I’ll ever move, you know, fully away from looking at it. It’s such an interesting institution. It works in 24 languages, you know. But I would like to do some work on other international courts. Thinking particularly of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, or the African Court of Peoples and Human Rights. Also the Strasbourg court, the European Court of Human Rights. I’m just at that sort of hunch stage. Because, you know, if you look at work that has been done in linguistics and work that has been done in translation studies and knowledge communication, that shows that there’s no inherent meaning in language. And yet– so law is this linguistic construct. And yet courts, international courts in particular, are very fond of saying, ‘well, according to the inherent meaning of this concept’ or, ‘according to the inherent meaning of this treaty’. But if other fields have established firmly that there is no inherent meaning in language then how can there be an inherent meaning in law? And so I’m interested in exploring that, but this is really at the very early stages. So, I’m hoping that in 2025 I can do a bit more thinking about that.

Alexandra: That sounds fascinating, Karen. I can’t wait to hear on that, but I feel we can wait. You know, there’s such a pressure in academia to do things quickly, like, it’s great to actually make the time and take the time to think about something enormous.

Karen: I’m not a, yeah. I have to say, I don’t do things terribly quickly. But again, I think that comes from a place of privilege. I’ve got a Chair, you know I have that space now if I need to, to take time to think about these things, so I’m aware of that.

Alexandra: Oh, but you know we’re grateful that you do have that space ‘cause we’re interested in what you’re producing. Maybe we’ll do another interview at some future point.

Karen: Absolutely. Yeah, any time.

Alexandra: What I’ll do I’ll put in the show notes things that Karen and I have spoken about, if you’ve enjoyed the show, it really does help us if you subscribe to our channel, or if you leave a 5 star review on the podcast app that you use or indeed just recommend the language on the move, podcast to your friends, your colleagues, your students, and we’ll speak to you next time.