The authors' experience in conducting English language proficiency tests for second language speakers of English facing police charges has shown that some have limited understanding of their legal rights. The research study reported here comments on the complexity of the rights information presented by police to a range of participants. It investigates comprehension of that information by performing listening and reading comprehension tests with the participants. The results indicate a number of difficulties and a significant difference in the scores of first and second language speakers of English. This article outlines the tests performed and the results for both first and second language speakers, as well as discussing the complexity of the questions found difficult by participants. The results reinforce the need to ask whether people are being given their rights if they cannot understand them.

This article discusses the use of well as a discourse marker in some New Zealand courtrooms. While well has been discussed by many in the past, the data have been selected mainly from small, friendly encounters of various kinds, including sociolinguistic interviews. The study reported on here looks at a very different situation that necessarily involves a range of relationships and includes both cooperative and adversarial activities. It confirms that explanations of well’s use focusing on single strands such as social indicators (e.g. gender) or discourse coherence are simplistic, a more fruitful account being afforded through a multi-pronged functional approach. Finally, the article considers the application of politeness and relevance theory.*

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In 2009 in New Zealand, an extraordinary case occupied the attention of the New Zealand public: the retrial of David Bain, who had been convicted on the charge of murdering his family in 1994. This article outlines the circumstances which led to the retrial, and the part which linguistics played in that. When Bain discovered his family had been killed, he telephoned the emergency services. Linguistics became involved when a dispute arose as to the content of a small part of that emergency call. Both the prosecution and the defence called expert linguistic evidence on this. The matter was resolved in a pre-trial application, the occurrence and outcome of which were suppressed until after Bain’s acquittal. The case illustrates the well-known dangers of transcripts and interpretations prepared by people who are not trained in linguistics.

Law courts purport to be seats of justice, yet there is constant debate about the evenhandedness of that justice and ordinary people's access to it. This thesis reports on a study of seven criminal hearings in the District Court in Auckland, New Zealand.The study focussed on repair (as defined in conversation analysis) and various phenomena which have been identified previously as characteristic of "powerless language" (that is, the speech used by those in subordinate positions to their social superiors). These phenomena included hesitations, hedges, intensifiers, witnesses asking questions, tag questions, high rising terminal intonation, polite terms, terms of address and well. Chapter One: Introduction Goal of this studySpeaking up in court is far from being an equal and clearly understood business. In spite of a commonly held perception in New Zealand that its justice system is the fairest possible, there are many ways in which it is inherently not equally available to and effective for everybody. Not least among these are the adversarial nature of the court system and matters of institutional bias, which are well-known and widely discussed, including by the legal fraternity.However, little or no attention has been given in New Zealand to the question of how language affects what happens in court. Language has been seen as merely a vehicle for arriving at legal decisions, for deciding disputes, and for dispensing justice. Indeed it acts in all these ways, and, it is assumed, very effectively.On the other hand, linguists have been looking for some time now at how language affects what happens in the courtroom. They have studied such areas as the effect that a defendant's or a witness's language has on juries' perceptions of them, and the effect that their narrative style can have on judges, as well as looking at the effects of lexical choices. In New Zealand, for example, Lane (1988) has done an in-depth study of the kinds of questions asked in Auckland district courtrooms. These studies have used a number of approaches, including ethnography of speaking, research on attitudes, and syntactic and semantic analysis.The goal of this study is to investigate the widely held view that a great deal of misunderstanding occurs in court, and to do so using the approaches outlined below in order to arrive at a comprehensive analysis. The beginning hypothesis was that, if misunderstanding is occurring in court, it may do so along not only inter-ethnic lines, but also along gender, power and professional/lay dimensions. Investigating this perception has involved looking at two broad strands of material in the data. The first of these is repair. It is perhaps obvious to suggest that repair is where we would find evidence of misunderstandings in court, whatever their underlying causes. Therefore the occurrence, functions and resolution of repair are considered, as well as the matter of who initiates the repairs in the data. It turns out that neither ethnographic factors nor power provide satisfactory ways to account for the o...