Lawrence Solan

University of Birmingham Scholar Award - Law

Lawrence is the Don Forchelli Professor of Law and Director of the Center for the Study of Law, Language and Cognition at Brooklyn Law School. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Much of his writing is about the interpretation of statutes and contracts. His books include The Language of Judges, Speaking of Crime (with Peter Tiersma), and The Language of Statutes: Laws and their Interpretation. He and Peter Tiersma co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law (2012), and he co-edited with Janet Ainsworth and Roger Shuy the 2015 volume, Speaking of Language and Law: Conversations on the Work of Peter Tiersma. Solan has been a visiting professor at the Yale Law School, and in the Psychology Department and Humanities Council at Princeton University. Following law school, he clerked for Justice Stewart Pollock of the Supreme Court of New Jersey. Prior to joining the Brooklyn Law School Faculty in 1996, he was first an associate, then a partner, at a New York litigation law firm.