Journal of Law and Policy Honors the Late Professor Larry Solan

In the field of linguistics and law, the late 1901 Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus Professor Larry Solan was regarded internationally as among its preeminent scholars. He served for nearly 30 years as an esteemed and beloved member of the Brooklyn Law faculty, was founder of the Center for the Study of Law, Language, and Cognition, and author of, among copious scholarly works, The Language of Judges (1993), which is widely considered the seminal work on linguistic theory and legal argumentation. He died on March 2, 2024, at 71.  

In November 2023, Solan’s brilliant career and scholarship were honored in a special symposium, which gathered scholars and experts in linguistics from around the country to Brooklyn Law School to present papers. Now, those papers have been collected in the first of two “Festschrift” symposium issues of the Journal of Law and Policy (Vol. 33, Issue 1), available online.  

“Larry’s work was, without exaggeration, groundbreaking,” writes Professor James Macleod, current director of the Center for the Study of Law, Language, and Cognition, in his introduction to the Journal’s issue, which features articles by a number of today’s most respected scholars in the field, all of whom have been influenced and inspired by Solan and his work. Citing the “significant gap in interdisciplinary legal studies” that had existed before Solan’s work began to fill that gap, Macleod said, “As the next 30 years of Larry’s own work, along with that of countless others, shows, there was then and remains today plenty of exciting work yet to be done. There couldn’t have been a better person than Larry Solan to open the door and invite us all in to do it.” 

Issue 1 includes articles exploring a range of issues, including textualism in Congress and the courts, written by scholars William Eskridge, Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Public Law, Yale Law School; Abbe R. Gluck, Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy, Yale Law School, and Laila M. Robbins, Yale Law School; Anita Krishnakumar, Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Legislation, Georgetown Law; and Professor Brian G. Slocum, Florida State University College of Law, Professor Kevin Tobia, Georgetown Law, and Nicole Steitz, Debevoise & Plimpton.   

In celebrating this issue of the Journal, Brooklyn Law also honors the enduring legacy of Solan, both to the school and to the academy, through his intellectual rigor and that of the legion of scholars, students, and colleagues he inspired, and through the work of the Center, under Macleod’s forward-thinking direction, which continues the groundbreaking research and collaborations in linguistics and the law that Solan so vigorously pioneered.