TRUE Project Hosts ‘The Courtroom as a Linguistic Arena’ Workshop

On March 20th, 2025, the TRUE Project team welcomed researchers from across the UK and Europe for an interdisciplinary workshop titled, ‘The Courtroom as a Linguistic Arena: Language, Law, and the Pursuit of Justice in Criminal Trials’. Hosted on Swansea University’s Singleton Campus, the event brought together scholars working across law, linguistics, psychology, and technology to examine courtroom discourse.  

Incorporating extended Q&A blocks at the end of each session, the workshop encouraged participants to ask questions, challenge ideas, and bring their own disciplinary perspectives into the discussion. This created space to think collectively about how linguistic practices shape credibility, responsibility, and decision‑making across the justice process.

Our full workshop programme can be viewed here. The sessions of the day addressed a range of themes, including:

• Narratives of Harm: How judicial and institutional narratives foreground certain forms of harm while obscuring others.

• Legal Meaning‑Making: How courts transform lay expressions into legal constructs, and how this process shapes credibility, culpability, and the boundaries of what can be said.

• Questioning and Sayability: How courtroom questioning strategies influence what becomes possible — or permissible — to articulate in court.

• Positioning in the Justice Process:How linguistic choices shape the portrayal of victims, offenders, and experts.

• Emerging AI Tools: How new technological forms of reasoning shape constructions of responsibility, risk, and culpability within evolving legal and cultural frameworks.

• Digital Evidence and Trust: How language mediates the interpretation of technologically complex evidence and the negotiation of trust.

Thank you to Dr Chris Heffer for a keynote that set the tone for thoughtful discussion, and to the presenters and audience who brought expertise, curiosity and momentum to the day.