Pergamon Language & Communication, Vol. 16. No. 3, pp. 205 214, 1996 Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0271-5309/96 $15.00 + .00 S0271-5309(96)00010-9 LAW LESSONS FOR LINGUISTS? ACCOUNTABILITY AND ACTS OF PROFESSIONAL CLASSIFICATION CHRISTOPHER HUTTON The rise of new disciplines and new areas of academic specialization is often interpreted as a sign of vitality. The rapidly expanding area of language and law can be viewed as a welcome indication that linguists are increasingly interested in the complex ways in which societies conduct their linguistic business. But this search for involvement carries with it a danger, for in seeking to explain society's needs to society, or in assuming the mantle of professionalism in relation to a particular set of social practices, linguists potentially expose their own in-house practices and beliefs to the scrutiny of a wide range of professionals in fields outside academia. They also make themselves accountable in some general sense to the general public. The question is: can linguistics as a whole meet this challenge? By 'linguistics' I mean in this context the discipline as a whole, i.e. the academic mainstream with its core of theoretical assumptions. In particular, I am thinking of the contributions by linguists to the recent Washington University Law Quarterly volume 'What is meaning in a legal text?' (Proceedings, 1995). Members of the professions such as lawyers, doctors, psychiatrists and social workers work within many different kinds of constraints in their professional lives. They must meet standardized accreditation criteria, and are judged by their interaction with processes and procedures that have real world outcomes (e.g. trials; operations). They need to master a range of different professional and lay discourses in order to talk to fellow professionals and to be able to communicate about their 'in-house' knowledge to the general public, their clients. Doctors, for example, talk both to other doctors and to patients about medical matters. Lawyers talk both to other lawyers and to their clients. While it is true that linguists talk to other linguists, their 'clients', as such, are typically students at various levels, and usually there is no real analogue in their professional experience to doctor-patient interaction. Students are socialized into the language of the linguist; they are novice professionals, at least potentially. 'Pure' specialists such as academic linguists are individually and collectively judge and jury over teaching and research in their own discipline. Thus, while academic linguists might consider themselves professionals, and might even be regarded as such by non-academics (for example in marketing surveys, sociological categorizations, etc), they rarely have the kinds of professional skills that are exercised at the intersection of academia and society. In this sense, they are not professional experts; their professional standards and professional knowledge are largely discipline-internal. Linguistic theories are created, debated, rejected or affirmed primarily by other linguists, and career advancement in linguistics, as in other academic careers, depends on peer review, on what 'the field' has to say. This is not necessarily to imply the theoretical beliefs of doctors or lawyers are better grounded Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to Christopher Hutton, University of Hong Kong, Department of English, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong. 205