This study of Anglo-American legal discourse is the first comprehensive discourse analysis of American legal language in its prototypical setting, the trial by jury. With ethnographic data gathered in a civil jury trial, the book compares the discourse processing of the legal participants and the lay jurors in the trial. The study argues for a Foucauldian discourse analysis of institutional languages, a social theory powerful enough to account for the power and tenacity of these Ianguages, where traditional linguistic explanation has failed.