Th e idea for this book originates from the 6th Cardiff Roundtable in Sociolinguistics, which was generously funded by the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University in July 2008. Adam Jaworski suggested that we might hold the Roundtable on the theme of language and law, and Gregynog Hall in the heart of the Welsh hills guaranteed that we ate and slept well. Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski were very supportive during the long process of proposing the book to Oxford University Press. Th e contributors to this volume have shown considerable patience while it moved toward publication. For this we are very grateful. We also thank them for their eager and constructive participation in the workshop and their fascinating resulting chapters. We recall here the invaluable contributions of Janet Cott erill, Howard Giles, Tim Grant, Sally Nelson, Th omas Scheff er, Larry Solan, and Jenny Th omas, who were present in person, paper, or video at the Roundtable, and thus indirectly contributed to this book. We thank John Conley’s assistant, Graham Ford, for his exceptional work on the production of the fi nal manuscript. We are also grateful to Maureen Cirnitski of Newgen for guiding us so carefully and patiently through the production process. Finally we thank Hallie Stebbins at OUP for taking oversight of this project at a late stage and helping move it along.