The application of linguistics to other areas of life has occurred in a somewhat natural, if haphazard, fashion. The first and most obvious applications were to education (first and second language learning, teaching, and testing), lexicography, translation, and speech therapy (Crystal 1981). There has been rather long standing interest in other fields, such as medical interaction (Mishler 1984; cf., van Naerssen and Kaplan elsewhere in this volume) and religious language (Samarin 1976), but it has been only within the past few years that increasing amounts of linguistic knowledge have been applied to the field of law.