ABSTRACT
In civil law, many cases are based on arguments about the interpretation of contracts or other legally binding texts. A great deal of court time in civil cases is devoted to arguments over the meaning of the words or phrases in a specific segment of a document. While it is usual for judges and lawyers to argue about the interpretation of words, it is of course well within the expertise of linguists to analysis meaning in a phrase. This chapter demonstrates how semantic and syntactic analysis can be brought to bear in a legal case and presents the analysis used in one such case in an Australian court. However, the chapter ultimately finds that the relationship between legal and linguistic interpretation is unclear and until this ambiguity can be resolved, linguists are unlikely to be welcome arbiters of meaning in courts of law.
