Multimodal Conduct in the Law: Language, Gesture and Materiality in Legal Interaction - 32

The study of language and law has seen explosive growth in the past 25 years.

Research on police interrogations, trial examination, jury deliberation, plea bargains, same sex marriage, to name a few, has shown the central role of written and oral forms of language in the construction of legal meaning.

However, there is another side of language that has rarely been analysed in legal settings: the role of gesture and how it integrates with language in the law.