Welcome to Episode 74 of Lexis. Jacky and Dan talk to Dr Laura Smith-Khan, Senior Lecturer - School of Law, University of New England, Australia about…

• How she got into the linguistics of law

• Where and how law and language overlap

• Clarity, accuracy and the power dynamics in legal language

• Migration, borders, refugees and the law

• Assessing ‘credibility’ and some of the processes of refugee law

• Critically assessing media discourses around migration

Laura Smith-Khan’s university profile: https://www.une.edu.au/staff-profiles/law/Dr-Laura-Smith-Khan_Profile

Laura is part of the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Research Network - more here: Law and Language – Sharing research, news and events related to law and language

as well as the Language on the Move research group - blog and podcast https://www.languageonthemove.com/author/laura/ 

Some of the studies and research mentioned in the show:

Legal literacy in a linguistically diverse society – Language on the Move 

Learning to speak like a lawyer – Language on the Move

Trust and suspicion at the airport – Language on the Move

Refugee credibility assessment and the vanishing interpreter – Language on the Move

The post we discussed about judges, clarity and distance: How Judges Think About Language – Language on the Move

The Bluey episode mentioned is Bluey Season 3, Episode 49 | The Sign and the episode’s impact on people looking up road rules received attention from the QLD government and the media, eg What are the rules around children sitting in the front seat of a car? And is it safe? - ABC News

Reading Challenges with lists of recommended books (2025 has yearly links back to 2018):

Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2025 – Language on the Move

Category – Language on the Move (posts organized by topic)

Authors – Language on the Move (full list of contributors, each with a short bio and link to posts)

Lexis is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lexispodcast.bsky.social 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates)

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewbutlerCA 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys