NEWS: 10th Edition will be held from 28 June to 3 July 2010.

Founded in 2000 by Prof. Malcolm Coulthard, the International Summer School in Forensic Linguistic Analysis addresses topics to do with the role, shape and evidential value of language in legal and forensic contexts. It was created in response to a growing demand for a course affording an overview of forensic linguistics while also laying solid foundations for a further study of this relatively new branch of applied linguistics.

The School’s first edition took place at Anglia Polytechnic University and was followed by four more events in Birmingham and one in Lodz, Poland. Since 2006 the School has been held at Aston University, where it is run by the Centre for Forensic Linguistics. Next edition will run from 28 June to 3 July 2010.

The School addresses subjects within the broadly defined discipline of forensic linguistics, including the structure of legal language, forensic authorship attribution, copyright issues, plagiarism and its detection, and forensic phonetics. We work with authentic language data and use real cases to illustrate theory. We opt for maximum student involvement and encourage critical inquiry and debate.

Each year we invite world-renowned scholars and/or practitioners to be our guest tutors. This gives the participants the unique opportunity to interact directly with those responsible for recent developments in the field of language and the law and forensic linguistics. Last year our guest tutors included Prof. Lawrence M. Solan of Brooklyn Law School and Prof. Peter Tiersma of Loyola Law School, authors of Speaking of Crime: The Language of Criminal Justice, and James F. Fitzgerald, formerly of the Behavioral Analysis Unit-1, Federal Bureau of Investigation, now with Academy Group, Inc. Apart from being professional linguists and/or lawyers, all of our tutors have first-hand experience of providing expert evidence for courts of law.