Language

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511657535.013

12 - Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2010

Edited by

Matthew Anderson and

Austin Sarat: Affiliation:
Amherst College, Massachusetts
Matthew Anderson: Affiliation:
University of New England, Maine
Cathrine O. Frank: Affiliation:
University of New England, Maine

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Summary

As I began to write this chapter, the intersections of law and language, more or less insistently visible in my quotidian scholarly and teaching praxis, were brought sharply into focus. I had for a semester been working collaboratively with a faculty colleague and two students on a clinical legal education project, my first direct involvement in live client clinical rather than simulation-based skills training.

As the spring semester began, the event to which our work had been directed, an asylum application hearing, took place in an ICE “family shelter” in rural Pennsylvania, where the clients had been detained for some months. They were able to see each other, it is true, and the shelter was evidently preferable to the jails in which they could well have been held, but although they could spend their days together, they were housed at night in separate cells (or rooms or dormitories) for men on the one hand, and women and children on the other. This situation complicated what “family” might be thought to signify in context – the enabling of what I will call familial, if not domestic or sexual, intimacy. So too the term “shelter” was complicated by its rendering, in context, euphemistic: “[t]he Berks County facility, a former nursing home in Leesport, Pa., about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia, is ‘less jail-like,’ [than the notorious Hutto family shelter in Texas].…[However, i]t is part of a larger juvenile facility housing U.S. citizens charged with or convicted of crimes.

Type: Chapter
Information: Law and the Humanities
An Introduction
, pp. 315 - 338

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511657535.013 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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