Translating the Social World for Law Linguistic Tools for a New Legal Realism

Elizabeth Mertz is John and Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School and Research Faculty at the American Bar Foundation. Her research focuses on the language of law in the U.S., in part through an examination of how that language is taught to first-year law students. Her book on that process is entitled The Language of Law School: Learning to and it was the co-winner of the Herbert Jacob Prize of the Law & Society Association. 

William K. Ford is Associate Professor of Law at John Marshall Law School. He received his law degree from the University of Chicago in 2003. Before joining the faculty at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago, he worked for the Los Angeles firm of Irell & Manella and then returned to the University of Chicago Law School as a Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law. 

Gregory M. Matoesian is Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His main area of study is language and multimodal practice in legal settings. He is the author of Reproducing Rape: Domination through Talk in the Courtroom (University of Chicago Press) and Law and the Language of Identity: Discourse in the William Kennedy Smith Rape Trial (Oxford University Press), as well as numerous articles in law and society and linguistic journals.

Peter Brooks is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar in the University Center for Human Values and the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University.

Robert P. Burns is the William W. Gurley Memorial Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law. 

William K. Ford is Associate Professor at the John Marshall Law School.

Susan Gal is Mae & Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and of Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

M. Catherine Gruber earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago.

Gregory Matoesian is Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Elizabeth Mertz is John and Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin and Senior Research Faculty at the American Bar Foundation.

Michael Silverstein is Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and of Psychology and in the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

Winnifred F. Sullivan is Professor and Chair in the Department of Religious Studies and Affiliate Professor of Law at Maurer School of Law at Indiana University, Bloomington.