Recent work in linguistic anthropology has generated new and exciting per spectives on the vital role of contextualization in language meaning and func tion. At the same time, scholarship on legal language has begun to develop a more social and constructionist vision of the way linguistic processes affect the workings of the law at many levels. This review places some of the scholarship on legal language within the context of current linguistic-anthro pological understandings of language use and contextualization, to develop a framework for further work on language and law. It also draws on work in legal scholarship that has illuminated the politics of legal discoursc, to dcmon strate how this kind of approach can enliven anthropological understandings of the social grounding of language.
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Elizabeth Mertz (1994) studied this question.