Non-English Speaking Clients

Abstract

Thank you, Yoli for inviting me to be on this panel. Thanks to Susan for providing what I thought was a really excellent context for this discussion. I want to start by, I guess, distinguishing the focus of my comments today from what we just heard from Susan. Susan provided a great deal of information that was, I think, largely ethnographic in nature about interpreters in courts and to some extent in law enforcement context. My focus is on the lawyer/client relationship, and particularly within the normative framework of client-centeredness that this morning's discussion was about as well and what the complications that are introduced when there's a language difference between lawyer and client in that relationship. Although linguistic diversity has been a feature of American society for much of our history, there exists today a demographic imperative for concerted examination of how language difference affects the lawyer/client relationship.