Papers by Janet Ainsworth
Not infrequently, police officers will use curse - that is, use extremely vulgar or obscene langu... more Not infrequently, police officers will use curse - that is, use extremely vulgar or obscene language - in the course of their encounters with criminal suspects. This practice has been defended as not only unobjectionable but as positively necessary to law enforcement. In this paper, I ...
Oxford University Press eBooks, Jun 1, 2016
Social Science Research Network, 2008
... Street Interactions by Janet Ainsworth Abstract: Not infrequently, police officers will use t... more ... Street Interactions by Janet Ainsworth Abstract: Not infrequently, police officers will use taboo language swearing, cursing, and similar kinds of obscene and insulting language--the course of their encounters with criminal suspects. This linguistic practice is ...
The Future of Children, 1996
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court issued a number of decisions guaranteeing certain p... more During the 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court issued a number of decisions guaranteeing certain procedural rights to juveniles. This article assesses the impact of these decisions on the actual practices of the delinquency jurisdiction of the juvenile court. Studies show that, by and large, the procedural mandates have not been met. A key example is the fact that a significant percentage of juveniles still do not receive effective legal representation. This article also explores the potential disadvantages to juveniles of no constitutional right to a jury trial in juvenile court, waivers into the adult criminal court system, and diversion programs. Because of the juvenile court's resistance to reform, a number of juvenile justice scholars are advocating the abolition of its jurisdiction over delinquency cases. The article concludes with various viewpoints on this current controversy.
North Carolina Law Review, 1991
Although the institution of the juvenile court developed rather recently in our legal system, it ... more Although the institution of the juvenile court developed rather recently in our legal system, it is now quite firmly established: every American state and nearly every industrialized nation has a juvenile court system in place The juvenile court is not without its critics, however. In this Article, Professor Janet Ainsworth recommends its complete abolition. Professor Ainsworth contends that society's current view of the nature of adolescence no longer comports with the turn-of-thecentury view that originally informed the development of an autonomous juvenile court, thus undermining the ideological legitimacy of a separate court system forjuvenile& In addition, Professor Ainsworth argues that, because of the availability of procedural safeguards in the adult court system and because of the greater opportunity for effective assistance of counsel in the adult courts, juveniles will, in fact, benefit from being tried within a unified criminal justice system. Using social constructivist theory as the foundation for her Article, Professor Ainsworth critically examines the changes in the social imagination of the nature of childhood and adolescence and proceeds to a reevaluation of one specific legal institution in light of that changed social construct Professor Ainsworth's analysis, however, has much broader implications for reshaping our legal system over time as society creates and recreates its collective notion of reality.
Yale Law Journal, Nov 1, 1993
Although this might be surprising, given that I am a law professor, my interest in language and l... more Although this might be surprising, given that I am a law professor, my interest in language and linguistics long predates my interest in the law. While I was an undergraduate student, I enrolled in an introductory linguistics course taught by Ray Jackendo , and I found the subject fascinating. I went on to take a second course from him, but at the time, the university had no linguistics department and no major available for students to take to concentrate on the eld, so I moved on to study other things, but continued to read linguistics books in my spare time. Language is the faculty more than any other than makes us human, and it seemed to me that understanding language and how it works was the best practical window into the problem of what it means to be human. After nishing my undergraduate degree, I went on to graduate school in Chinese history, and in preparation for an academic career in that eld, studied both the Chinese and Japanese languages. Both languages challenged me to think about the ways in which languages di er-and believe me, both of these languages di ered dramatically from English, and from each other as well. But studying these Asian languages also impressed me with the ways in which unrelated languages nevertheless share a great many common features. I assumed that further language study would be in my future as a scholar in Asian history, but life often takes unexpected turns, and I ended up losing my dissertation advisor to an untimely death, and therefore needed to think about what a career Plan B might look like. Plan B ended up with an application to law schoolnot because I wanted to be a lawyer, but because I could get a joint degree in history and law, and nish my dissertation on Tang Dynasty taxation practices, while getting generous law school nancial aid for my entire graduate education. This was the plan, then. But again, my academic life took an unanticipated turn when, during my rst year in law school, I happened to volunteer for an extra-curricular project in which law students served as legal representatives to prisoners charged with violating prison rules for which they could have their sentences increased if they lost their disciplinary cases. I had no intention to do anything more than take on a case or two, but once I took on my rst such case, I was hooked. Before long, I began to wonder if nishing a dissertation on medieval Chinese law was really the best use of my
2017 AAAS Annual Meeting (February 16-20, 2017), Feb 18, 2017
Social Science Research Network, 2009
Th e rules of evidence govern the admissibility of evidence in trials and determine the scope of ... more Th e rules of evidence govern the admissibility of evidence in trials and determine the scope of meaning to be accorded to that evidence. Th is paper examines two American evidence rules and suggests that both rules incorporate 'masculine' norms of language usage. Th e evidence rule defi ning adoptive admissions provides that, when a person is confronted with an accusation of wrongdoing and fails to assertively deny it, the allegation is deemed to be admitted through silence. Th is rule presumes that one's natural reaction upon an accusation would invariably be an explicit denial, such that silence can be fairly taken as a confession. Th us, this rule privileges assertive and confrontational modes of speech-all coded as 'masculine'-and ignores the ways in which power asymmetries impact responses to accusation. Likewise, the evidence rule construing apology as an admission of fault denigrates expressions of emotional solidarity-coded as 'feminine'-in favour of a presumption that penalizes those who say 'sorry' by presuming it means 'I'm sorry I did something wrong' rather than 'I'm sorry that something bad has happened to you'. Evidence rules such as these both channel and constrain the legal interpretation of language in ways that sustain gendered hierarchies of legal power.
Social Science Research Network, May 11, 2010
Linguists engaged by attorneys sometimes find their experiences as consultants and witnesses conf... more Linguists engaged by attorneys sometimes find their experiences as consultants and witnesses confusing and frustrating. To some extent, this may be an inevitable consequence of the adversarial justice system, but it also can reflect linguists’ misunderstanding of the obligations imposed by the ethical rules governing the practice of law. These rules can engender a skeptical assessment of the linguist’s expertise and analysis by the lawyers in the case—the hiring lawyer no less than opposing counsel. Discovery rules can create traps for the unwary expert that can undermine the expert’s credibility in this case and in cases in the future. While the hiring lawyer can properly explore the limits of what the expert can provide as helpful testimony, the linguist must resist the seductive lure of becoming a “hired gun.”
Language and law, 2021
Linguists analyzing the practices of American-style police interrogation have revealed the discur... more Linguists analyzing the practices of American-style police interrogation have revealed the discursive attributes of police interrogation that can, often unwittingly, induce false confessions from suspects. Further, psychologists have identified a number of factors that can make particular subjects of police interrogation especially vulnerable to false confessions under interrogation. This article suggests that women who have been victims of serial domestic violence may be a heretofore unrecognized class of those particularly vulnerable individuals. Because the psychodynamics of American-style police interrogation so closely parallel the psychodynamics of intimate terroristic domestic violence, victims of domestic violence may react to police interrogation with the same coping strategies-accommodation and acquiescence-that they resort to in attempting to avoid battering. In the context of police interrogation, that would potentially lead to false confessions. Collaborative research by linguists and psychologists is needed to mitigate this possibility for miscarriages of justice.
Boston College Law Review, 1995
Law. My appreciative thanks go to Sidney DeLong for his suggestions and comments; as always, they... more Law. My appreciative thanks go to Sidney DeLong for his suggestions and comments; as always, they were on point.
Cornell Law Review, 1996
he wise man is careful to ... regulate names so that they will apply correctly to the realities t... more he wise man is careful to ... regulate names so that they will apply correctly to the realities they designate. In this way he ... discriminates properly between things that are the same and those that are different. Hsin Tzul Recently I had an experience in my Chinese Law class that prompted me to question how comparative law is taught and, by extension, to think about how comparative legal scholars can transcend our own culturally-specific legal concepts and categories to draw valid conclusions about the legal order of any non-Western society. I had asked my students to read an excerpt from Hugh Scogin's fine article on contract law in early imperial China 2 and was pleased with the robust class discussion that followed. One enthusiastic student lingered after class to continue the discussion. "I was surprised that the Chinese had contract law as long ago as the Han Dynasty," the student remarked. "Tell me," he continued, "Had the ancient Chinese developed promissory estoppel by then, too?" A bit taken aback by the seemingly inapposite question, I wondered if the student might be joking. The student's demeanor, however, showed me that he was indeed entirely serious. He saw nothing odd about the question, bet Associate Professor of Law, Seattle University School of Law, BA. Brandeis University, MA. Yale University, J.D. Harvard Law School. I am grateful to the organizers and participants of the following two conferences for giving me the opportunity to deliver developing versions of this Article and receive useful feedback: the University of British Columbia conference, "Chinese Law: A Re-examination of the Field: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to the Study of Chinese Law" and the University of Utah conference, "New Approaches to Comparative and Foreign Law." My appreciative thanks go as well to Hugh Scogin, Randy Kandel, Frances Foster, Pitman Potter, and Sid DeLong for reviewing drafts of this Article; the finished product reflects their helpful comments and suggestions. Orthographic note: I have generally used standard pinyin romanization for Chinese words and names. When, however, a Chinese name in the title of a footnoted source material is romanized according to another system, I have retained that spelling in my subsequent textual references to that person to avoid confusion. For instance, I render the name of the early Confucian political thinker as Hsfin Tzu rather than Xunzi because the Burton Watson translation of his writings uses Wade-Giles romanization.
Lingue culture mediazioni, Oct 17, 2017
The structure and practices of justice systems in many parts of the world are undergoing what can... more The structure and practices of justice systems in many parts of the world are undergoing what can be seen as a kind of revolutionand one not merely of professional interest to lawyers and judges. What we are seeing in nation after nation is a move from inquisitorial models of legal adjudication toward adversarial models. The discourses of adjudication in these contrasting types of trials are changing the ways in which lawyers, judges, and witnesses come to see their role in the process. The change has implications that extend far beyond the courtrooms in which trials play out, however. Because the shift from inquisitorial to adversarial justice models determines how legal narratives are created and deployed in trials, this change has the potential to impact popular perceptions of legal legitimacy, which in turn has implications for the relationship of citizens to their government and justice systems. This article will detail the global character of this change in the nature of the discourse used in legal adjudication and will explore its potential ramifications for legal professionals and for society more generally.
The international journal of speech language and the law, Nov 21, 2016
International journal for the semiotics of law, Mar 5, 2011
Roger Shuy, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Georgetown University, is without a doub... more Roger Shuy, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Georgetown University, is without a doubt one of the world's leading scholars on language in society. The author of more than 30 books and countless articles on sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, Shuy has in ...
The international journal of speech language and the law, Jul 24, 2008
American constitutional law provides protection for arrested persons from coercive police interro... more American constitutional law provides protection for arrested persons from coercive police interrogation by giving them the right to refuse to answer questions and to the assistance of a lawyer during questioning. Once these Miranda rights are invoked by the interrogated suspect, the police must cease questioning immediately. In recent years, however, courts have adopted restrictive definitions of the kind of invocation that will count as legally efficacious. In using hyper-literal parsings of the language of suspects who attempt to assert their rights, these judges fail to utilize ordinary norms of conversational implicature and ignore the power asymmetries inherent in custodial police interrogation. Instead, these strained interpretations result in part from an ideology of language that presumes that language is a transparent medium of communication. Because direct and unmodified locutions are consequently privileged, most attempts to claim constitutional rights are found to be defective. As a result, the constitutional protections of Miranda re practically unattainable by most arrestees.
Springer eBooks, Jan 29, 2013
... Braids?: Employee Dress Codes and the Semiotic Performance of Race and Gender in the Workplac... more ... Braids?: Employee Dress Codes and the Semiotic Performance of Race and Gender in the Workplace Janet Ainsworth John D. Eshelman Professor of Law ... and Gender in the WorkplaceJanet Ainsworth Seattle University School of Law 1. Introduction ...
Seattle University Law Review, Oct 5, 2020
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Papers by Janet Ainsworth