Abstract
It is almost impossible to think about the scandal that led to President Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial without recalling his answer to a question under oath before a federal grand jury with these words: ‘It depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is.’ (Grand Jury Transcript, p. 510).2 Clinton’s political enemies were not alone in adopting that sentence as a model for how Clinton in particular and lawyers in general rely on silly, unnatural uses and understandings of language to achieve favourable results.
The author wishes to thank Amy Blackman and Mary Ann Buckley for their valuable assistance in preparing this chapter, and Roy Gainsburg for pointing out some important examples. This work was supported by a summer research grant from Brooklyn Law School.
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© 2002 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Solan, L.M. (2002). The Clinton Scandal: Some Legal Lessons from Linguistics. In: Cotterill, J. (eds) Language in the Legal Process. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522770_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522770_11
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