This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attachedcopy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial researchand education use, including for instruction at the authors institution

and sharing with colleagues.

Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling orlicensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party

websites are prohibited.

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of thearticle (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website orinstitutional repository. Authors requiring further information

regarding Elsevier’s archiving and manuscript policies areencouraged to visit:

http://www.elsevier.com/copyright

Author's personal copy

Who owns language? Mother tongues as intellectual property and theconceptualization of human linguistic diversity

Christopher HuttonSchool of English, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Rd., Hong Kong SAR, People’s Republic of China

a r t i c l e i n f o

Keywords:Language and lawLanguage as constructLanguage rightsMother tongueNative speakerOwnership

a b s t r a c t

This paper considers a number of perspectives on the notion of ownership of language andlanguages. It argues that from the point of view of law and legal theory there is no reason inprinciple why a language cannot be owned. Two conceptualizations of language ownershipare discussed. The first is the ‘liberal’ view, which sees language as an open-access unstruc-tured space. This is publicly or collectively owned in the sense that it is ‘non-property’. Thesecond is the mother tongue–native speaker model, which views language as the propertyof the ethnos, and understands it as highly structured, relatively closed space, to whichnative speakers have privileged access. On the ‘liberal view’, it would be wrong in principleto ‘enclose’ an entire language, or grant a monopoly right over it, and at most limited priv-atization is justified for the purposes of copyright and trademark law, i.e. to protect eco-nomic rights. For the mother tongue–native speaker model, the idea of language rightsrepresents one form of recognition of a language as property. For the indigenous languagesof face-to-face ethnic communities, a form of monopoly ownership has been argued as aserious option, though the exact form of the ownership and the nature of the intellectualproperty rights involved remain unclear. Finally the question is posed as to the languagepolitics that follow from the integrationist view that languages are ‘myths’ or ‘constructs’.

� 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

This paper takes ownership of a language as an extreme case of the potential intervention of law in issues of culturalproperty, arguing that it can be used to illuminate what is at stake morally, politically and socially in contemporary languagepolitics. The idea of ownership is associated with authority over things, and also with a sense of moral entitlement to exploitand control, and to deny others access to those same things. Law distinguishes between entities that can own, entities thatcan be owned, and entities that can neither own nor be owned. To be owned in a legal sense, the entity must fall under one ofthe recognized forms of property. For example, English land law regards water as ‘incapable of being owned’ (Gray and Gray,2005, p. 60). That these boundaries are mobile and predicated on philosophical and ideological categories is shown by theinstitution of slavery, under which human beings both own and are owned, and the slave is treated as an article of personalproperty.1 The company, with its ‘legal personality’, can both own and be owned (Iwai, 1999), and companies, unlike ‘naturalpersons’, are potentially immortal. They are much more than the sum of their various agents, directors, managers and share-holders, and are capable of owning assets, making contracts, suing and being sued, and even of committing manslaughter.2

A sense of ownership or entitlement frequently subsists in the absence of legal ownership and can enjoy powerful formsof social or moral recognition. To ask whether a language could be owned in the legal sense is to raise complex questions not

0388-0001/$ - see front matter � 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2010.06.001

E-mail address: chutton@hku.hk1 On historical legal debates about the nature of the slave as property in the United States, see Morris (1996, pp. 61ff).2 The United Kingdom has a Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act (2007).

Language Sciences 32 (2010) 638–647

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Language Sciences

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/ locate/ langsci

Author's personal copy

only about the nature of the thing owned, but also the status of the owner, and the relationship that constitutes ownership. Ifthere exists an entity called ‘a language’ which is capable of recognition within intellectual property (IP) law or some otherlegal-conceptual framework, then it would need to be determined which individuals or groups – its native speakers as indi-viduals or as a collectivity – could lay claim to such an intellectual property right. There would need to be a determination asto what the nature of that ownership is in intellectual property terms, what rights and prohibitions followed from it, andwhat time limit it would be subject to. The collectivity of owners would have to be reified in some way so as to be recog-nizable to, and manipulable, by law. Legal recognition of a right invests the law’s definitional power and control in the objectof the right, in the owners of the right, and in the nature of the relationship to the right. The thing owned becomes a creatureof law, and law becomes its co-creator, and in that sense, its co-owner.

Even to raise the question of the legal ownership of language is a symptom of the ‘juridification’ of social issues, of ‘legal-ism’ as defined by Ford (2005, p. 12): ‘the tendency to describe social conflicts first and foremost in legal terms’. Legal dis-course and conduct are increasingly pervading daily life: ‘the work-place, the school, and even the home mimic the languageof the law, and as a consequence replicate its conceptual schemes’ (Campos, 1998, p. 5). Two recent examples of law beingrequired to draw contentious social boundaries are the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court judgment concerning the admis-sion policy of orthodox Jewish schools (R v Governing Body of JFS, 2009) and the involvement of the Malaysian courts indetermining whether Moslems have ownership of, or a monopoly of, the use of ‘Allah’ in religious texts (Chong, 2009).

Issues of reification, labeling and control arise just as forcibly within the academic study of language, which, like law, can beseen as recreating social phenomena in its own image. For example, in colonial contexts, missionaries and officials applieddescriptive regimes (grammars, dictionaries) and processes of standardization which led to the reification or reengineeringof language labels, boundaries and identities (Bolton and Hutton, 2000). In some contexts, this led to the introduction ofnew concepts of cultural ownership (Rigsby and Sutton, 1982, Le Page and Tabouret-Keller, 1985, pp. 240ff.) and the reificationof the relationship between a newly applied concept of ethnos and a normalized language variety. Similar arguments now arisein relation to the linguistic standardization and normalization carried out by software and hardware companies (Dor, 2004, p.114).

2. Ownership and property

In law there is a fundamental tension between the idea of ownership as a direct relation to a thing and ownership under-stood as a right in relation to a thing. In the first case, it is the entity itself which is owned; in the second, it is the right in theproperty that is owned: ‘Property is not, necessarily, the thing itself, which is owned; it is the right of the owner in relation toit’ (Robertson v Rochester Folding Box Co 1902, p. 564, per Gray J.). Ownership is never an indivisible absolute right, and isalso frequently bound up with obligations, duties and responsibilities. In land law, the understanding of property ‘oscillatesbetween a purely physical conception of the physical stuff of land and a more cerebral image of land as comprising a co-ordinated set of abstract rights’ (Gray and Gray, 2005, p. 5). This opposition is frequently cast in historical terms, with ideasof property and ownership seen as evolving from concrete to abstract. Vandevelde (1980, p. 328) characterizes this as a shiftfrom a normative stress on absolute dominion over physical things (with exceptions explained or rationalized away) to arelational, abstract dephysicalized notion of property which is indistinguishable ultimately from any valuable interest orright. The dephysicalized conception of ownership and property might be understood to reflect a shift from a social orderin which landowning was the dominant form of wealth to modern capitalism in which manufacturing, market mobilityand entrepreneurial dynamism are dominant. One end-point of this conceptual shift is a blurring of the distinction betweenrights over things and rights between persons. On this view, property rights ultimately regulate interpersonal relationships:‘The entire law of property, every property right and relationship, and every item of property, is wholly in the service ofhuman persons and just relationships between persons’ (Finnis, 2002, p. 51).

The rise of intellectual property law is one symptom of this widening of the notion of property and the increasingly abstractnature of property rights. By the 18th century quotation-marks had changed from marking important public language to des-ignating owned segments: ‘quotation-marks came to privilege and protect words belonging to the individual who producedthem’ (De Grazia, 1994, p. 298). The Statute of Anne (1709) which recognized authors’ economic rights was passed followingarguments in favour of recognizing copyright as a property right (Bainbridge, 2007, p. 30). As modern intellectual property lawtook shape, notably with the Berne Convention of 1886 which set up an international system of copyright law, the question ofownership of words and other ‘intangible goods’ became increasingly significant. Copyright has been increasingly treated as‘more akin to conventional property than a finely honed instrument of expressive diversity’ (Netanel, 2008, p. 7).

Trademark law is one of the domains identified by Vandevelde in this shift from concrete to abstract, relational forms ofownership. What we now think of trademark protection was originally provided by an action for fraud, and it was not untilMillington v Fox (1838) that the courts were willing to find a property right in relation to a trademark. By the mid-19th cen-tury a court could declare (Deringer v Plate 1865, p. 295, cited in Vandevelde, 1980, p. 343):

[T]he trademark is property, and the owner’s right of property in it is as complete as that which he possesses in the goodsto which he attaches it, and the law protects him in the enjoyment of the one as fully as of the other.

Today, in what has been termed ‘hypercapitalism’ (Graham, 2006), some of the most valuable objects in the world arelinguistic entities created and protected by intellectual property law, namely trademarks. ‘Coca Cola’ is estimated to have

C. Hutton / Language Sciences 32 (2010) 638–647 639

Author's personal copy

a value of 70 billion dollars. Increasingly global conglomerates like Nike are not in the business of manufacturing things:‘image is everything’, and ‘there is no value in making things anymore’ (Klein, 1999, pp. 196–7). While this process may re-flect the increasingly abstract nature of property rights, it also involves the legal reification or concretization of (particularelements of) language. Of course the physical control and possession of physical objects remain a significant reference pointin property law, but the nature of ownership in relation to financial instruments, such as shares and ‘sub-shares’ for example,is a matter of quite refined metaphysical speculation (Pretto-Sakmann, 2005).

3. Two views of collective ownership of language

In what might be termed the ‘liberal’ view of language, property rights are associated with a line between the public sphereand individual ‘sovereignty’ in terms of private ownership. Locke ([1690] 2001, p. 424) stressed the public character of language:

For words, especially of languages already framed, being no man’s private possession, but the common measure of com-merce and communication, it is not for any one at pleasure to change the stamp they are current in, nor alter the ideasthey are affixed to; or at least, when there is a necessity to do so, he is bound to give notice of it.

This liberal idea of a free linguistic space is complemented by the need for individual private ownership where appropri-ate. Justice Paterson in Van Horne’s Lessee v Dorrance (1795, p. 310) stated that

the right of acquiring and possessing property, and having it protected, is one of the natural, inherent and inalienablerights of man. Men have a sense of property: Property is necessary to their subsistence, and correspondent to their naturalwants and desires; its security was one of the objects, that induced them to unite in society. No man would become amember of a community, in which he could not enjoy the fruits of his honest labour and industry. The preservation ofproperty then is a primary object of the social compact[.]

A key question for intellectual property law is how far ownership of an intellectual property right extends into the publicdomain. A series of late 19th century cases reflects a rise in judicial anxiety about where the line of control should be drawnin relation to trademarks. Lord Herschell in The Eastman Photographic Materials Company, Limited v The Comptroller-Gen-eral of Patents, Designs, and Trade-Marks (1898, p. 580) affirmed the public ownership of the English language:

The vocabulary of the English language is common property: it belongs alike to all; and no one ought to be permitted toprevent the other members of the community from using for purposes of description a word which has reference to thecharacter or quality of goods.

This liberal understanding of language does not pay careful attention to the distinction between ‘language’ and ‘a lan-guage’. This is related to the common law legal fiction whereby lawyers ‘engage in and live the myth that each person knowsthe law because it is in English’ (Morrison, 1989, p. 285). English as the language of the law holds sway in a quasi-universalfashion over all in its dominion, not over an ethnic group. In Camden (Marquis) v Inland Revenue Commissioners (1914, p.647), Cozens-Hardy put this as follows:

I thought that a modern Act of Parliament was framed in language which is intelligible to everybody, and which appliesnot to any local custom or consideration of that kind, but to the whole of Great Britain (and I think beyond that, else-where, but at any rate to the whole of England).

Judges in the common law tradition have used the emotive metaphor of enclosure to frame debates about that boundary(Perfection: Joseph Crosfield and Sons’ Application 1909, per Cozens-Hardy, p. 141):

Wealthy traders are habitually eager to enclose parts of the great common of the English language and to exclude thegeneral public of the present day and of the future from access to the enclosure.

It is an ill-defined public that owns the English language, and the form of implied ownership is one well-recognized byland law, namely ownership through constant and unbroken use. Yet while this liberal-individualist tradition recognizescommon ownership, that ownership is understood as a special form of non-ownership. Language is a negative space, the out-er boundaries of which are defined against the norm of individual ownership of private property. Language is the non-privateproperty of non-individuals, not the collective property of a defined group of people. It has no agents and no central control(Posner, 1983, pp. 44–5):

Language is like the free market. No legislature or bureaucracy prescribes the forms of speech, the structure of the lan-guage, or the vocabulary that individuals use. Like a free market, a language is an immensely complicated yet private anddecentralized institution.

Language is private in the same sense that it is public: i.e. it is neither owned by the state, nor by any corporate or col-lective body, group, or set of individuals. It is analogous to an imperial (as opposed to a national) political space, in that par-ticipation or membership arises through falling under its jurisdiction, rather than through an organic connection in virtue ofsome feature of identity.

By contrast, in what we might call the mother tongue–native speaker tradition, a language is the collective property of itsnative speakers, understood collectively as a Volk or ethnos (‘people’). The Volk is defined as a historically continuous descent

640 C. Hutton / Language Sciences 32 (2010) 638–647

Author's personal copy

group, which owns a distinct language and has a defined territory. Its language and culture are part of its collective property.Rather than an open, unstructured space, the language is a highly structured systematic object. It is stamped with the markof its creator and owner, the community of native speakers. The key modern German formulations of the idea of Volk weremade as a reaction to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquest of Europe, which though the transplantation of theNapoleonic Code created the first modern, i.e. modernizing, empire (Ellis, 2003). This linguistic ideology is associated bothhistorically and in the contemporary world with a reactive response to intrusive, or colonizing, modernity, now frequentlyidentified with globalization, and can be understood as an essential ingredient of liberal nationalism, or as an exclusive,xenophobic concept, as in Nazi Germany (Hutton, 2005).

We could also find here two contrasting ideas of self-ownership. Self-ownership is an important idea for liberal and liber-tarian views of the self, since it allies an idea of property with a particular political idea of individual freedom. Some legaltheorists start out with self-ownership as ‘a launching pad for a general theory of property’, but this is controversial withinlegal theory (Dan-Cohen, 2002, p. 273). The self-ownership of the individual is a form of sovereignty and the assertion of thissovereignty involves a rejection of ideas of collective culture and ownership as potentially coercive. The Romantic concep-tion of self-ownership, which relates to ideas of authenticity, unmediated access, natural identity, untrammeled self-expression, etc. can be expressed either in individualistic or collectivist terms. But collective self-ownership, i.e. the owner-ship by a people of itself, its culture and language, is quite foreign to the liberal tradition. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s(1749–1832) verse drama Hermann und Dorothea, set against the background of the French Revolutionary wars of the 1790s,Hermann addresses his idealized rural German bride in the closing section as follows: ‘Du bist mein; und nun ist das Meinemeiner als jemals’ (‘You are mine: and now that which is mine is more mine than ever’, Goethe [1797] 1830, p. 203). Thisreflexive hyper-ownership (‘more mine than ever’) characterizes the self-conscious and assertive form of ownership ofdifference within groups, ethnic identities, and nations that have retained a sense of continuity with a past understood assubject to disruption by an intrusive modernity.

It is important to stress the distinct nature of the liberal and the mother tongue–native speaker positions, even if only asideal types on the opposite ends of a complex continuum. For example, the claim is commonly made by academics that thenative speakers or native English-speaking countries no longer hold a monopoly over English, and that the English languageis now nobody’s property. Widdowson (1994, p. 385) asserts that English ‘is not a possession that they [sc. the native speak-ers] lease out to others, while still retaining the freehold. Other people actually own it.’ This assertion relies for its impact ona subsidiary yet fundamental assertion that speakers of other languages do in general still own their own languages and havethe moral and other rights that accrue to this form of collective self-ownership. The flip-side of assertions of the non-own-ership of English in this specific context is the validation of the Romantic theory of language ownership, not the liberal viewof language as an open-access space.

4. German spelling reform

The issue of language ownership arose in the case of German spelling reforms promulgated in 1996 (Johnson, 2005).Against a background of dissent and confusion about the government’s power in relation to the reform, the Federal Consti-tutional Court in Germany ruled in 1998 that the government of the individual states (Länder), which in Germany are respon-sible for education policy, had the right to impose a new spelling system in the educational domain, but not in otherdomains. The court rejected the idea put forward by the Lower House of the German Parliament (Bundestag) that languagechange of this kind should only proceed organically and by consensus within the speech community: the German languagebelonged to the people.3 Pointing to a long history of official intervention in spelling reform, the court did not accept that theclaim that ownership by the people put the German beyond the authority of the government in all respects:

It does not follow from the special character of language that there should be an absolute prohibition on its regulation.The assumption that language ‘belongs’ to the people cannot justify such a prohibition; for this ‘belonging’ does notexpresses a recognized classification in any legal sense; nor could the acceptance of this underlying proposition, evenif it could be given legal content, prevent the state’s intervention. The fact that an object does not belong to the state doesnot prevent the state from subjecting its use to certain rules. Further, the fact that language does not have its origins in thestate and develops of its own accord out of usage in society does not stand in the way of its regulation by the state. Lan-guage shares this characteristic with numerous entities which are subject to regulation. [. . .] The state cannot howeversimply regulate language in any way it sees fit. The special character of language does give rise to limitations, but onlyfor the manner and scope of a regulation, not for any regulation whatsoever.4

3 Der Deutsche Bundestag ist der Überzeugung, daß sich die Sprache im Gebrauch durch die Bürgerinnen und Bürger [. . .] ständig und behutsam, organischund schließlich durch gemeinsame Übereinkunft weiterentwickelt. Mit einem Wort: Die Sprache gehört dem Volk (para 55).

4 Auch aus der Eigenart der Sprache folgt kein absolutes Regelungsverbot. Die Annahme, die Sprache, gehöre’ dem Volk, kann ein solches Verbot nichtbegründen; denn weder bringt das, Gehören’ eine Zuordnung im Rechtssinn zum Ausdruck noch könnte die der Annahme zugrunde liegende These, fallsihrrechtlicher Gehalt zukäme, eine staatliche Befassung verhindern. Daß ein Gegenstand dem Staat nicht, gehört’, hindert diesen nicht daran, seinen Gebrauchbestimmten Regeln zu unterwerfen. Auch der Umstand, daß die Sprache nicht aus einer staatlichen Quelle fließt und sich im gesellschaftlichen Gebrauch vonselbst entwickelt, steht einer staatlichen Regelung nicht entgegen. Diese Eigenschaften teilt die Sprache mit zahlreichen Regelungsgegenständen. [. . .] Der Staatkann die Sprache deswegen aber nicht beliebig regeln. Begrenzende Wirkungen ergeben sich aus der Eigenart der Sprache jedoch nur für Art und Ausmaß einerRegelung, nicht dagegen für eine Regelung überhaupt. (para 123)

C. Hutton / Language Sciences 32 (2010) 638–647 641

Author's personal copy

The court did not contradict the idea that the German language belonged to the German people, and affirmed that therewere limits on the right of the state to control language.

The German Constitutional Court ruling raises the question of agency, both in relation to the language itself, and thespeakers of the language. The German spelling case can be framed as clash between the Romantic rights of the people toauthentic self-ownership and the power of the modern state to engineer and control. But the German Constitutional courtissues its judgments ‘in the name of the people’ (‘im Namen des Volkes’). The court therefore ritually stakes a claim to legit-imate and authentic agency on behalf of the people, which is itself the collective owner of the German language. Even thoughownership of a language is not a recognized legal category, the court, as the agent or representative of the people, is alsoinvested in its own Romantic theory of ownership. The court in effect asserts that ultimate ownership of law is investedin the Volk, the same entity that owns the German language.

5. Culture, language and intellectual property law

Economists, it has been argued, generally accept that, ‘so far as is feasible, all valuable resources, including copyrightableworks, should be owned, in order to create incentives for their efficient exploitation and to avoid overuse’ (Landes andPosner, 2003, p. 475). Could this be applied to individual languages? Is a language a valuable resource? Posner and Landeslook at intellectual property law from the point of view of market efficiency, and from the avowed aim of promoting crea-tivity by rewarding innovation, balancing this creation of property monopolies with time-limitations or other restrictions.The model is individualist, in the sense that creativity is assumed to stem from an individual creator or a team, not froman unconsciously creative, evolving organic collective. The question of group authorship, culture and intellectual propertyis raised by Scafidi (2005), where the clash between creativity and freedom in the public domain and demands for protectionfor ‘cultural products’ is analyzed (Scafidi, 2005, p. 12):

One of the limitations of our current scheme of intellectual property protection, besides the often-cited narrow scope andgreat expense, is the treatment of group authorship. From high tech to low tech, from the Linux operating system toNative American folklore, our system struggles to assign intellectual property rights to authors who fail to evoke theRomantic image of the solitary artist scribbling away in an unheated garret or the unkempt scientist waking from a fitfulnap on a cot in the laboratory with a sudden flash of insight.

The issue of linguistic ownership arises most powerfully where the claim relates to the politics of resource control, indig-enous knowledge, ownership of heritage, etc. Discussing problems of co-ownership in relation to intellectual property,Scafidi (2005, p. 21) sets out the following issues:

Still more likely to fall outside the realm of intellectual property are the creative expressions of an unincorporated group,such as a particular race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, profession, avocation, class, or even gender or age cate-gory. The intangible products of these cultural groups, whether created deliberately or as a by-product of social interac-tion over time, tend to fail the tests of agency and novelty common to the utilitarian and ethical theories of intellectualproperty protection. Consider cultural products such as cuisine, dress, music, dance, folklore, handicrafts, images, healingarts, and language.

Scafidi terms some intangible creations ‘accidental property’, in that ‘neither commodification nor reduction to owner-ship serves as the primary impetus for their development’ (2005, p. 24).

Some jurisdictions recognize so-called ‘language rights’ in relation to education, access to government and legal services,etc. These are often conceptualized through a global ‘ecology’ of difference and through organicist metaphors, including theidea of ‘language death’. Ecological metaphors are combined with a conception of a language as property: ‘Language, accord-ing to language rights ideology, is a collective property owned by specific groups and is to be made available for the use ofindividuals within those groups’ (Maurer, 2003, p. 776). If we accept that property rights are rights in an entity, then theselanguage rights might be conceptualized as legal property. Likewise, if we understand property and ownership as ultimatelyreducible to human relationships, then language rights could also be framed in this way.

Simply put, if language is understood as forming a central part of a cultural inheritance, then it might plausibly be seen asconstituting the collective property of a people, and that ownership might be recognizable at law. The issues here parallellandmark cases in the United States, Australia, Canada and other jurisdictions over indigenous land claims, where the com-mon law courts have been faced with a challenge from outside the common law system to its conception of ownership, butalso a partial appropriation of the system’s idea of property and ownership as, again, a reactive response to intrusive moder-nity. A document posted on the internet discussing state-sponsored Aboriginal language programmes in Australia lamentsthe lack of legal protection for an intellectual property right in a language ([Owning Language], 2007):

The paradox for communities is that while the actual material expressions of their cultural spirituality are protected bythe law of copyright, there is no such protection of the language that provides the unique linguistic vehicle through whichthese icons of identity can be explored, discussed and inherited across generations.

The assumption here is that the native speakers of the language are the collective owners, and that this ownership givesmoral rights which should be recognized by the law. The document argues for a form of collective ‘self-ownership’, in that theidentity that is being defended is owned absolutely, and this includes the languages which are fundamental to that identity.

642 C. Hutton / Language Sciences 32 (2010) 638–647

Author's personal copy

The document does not explain exactly what would be meant by an assertion of an intellectual property right over a lan-guage. Copyright for example is a time-bound property right, and therefore unsuitable in its present form for the heritagepurposes envisioned here. Could one obtain a right that would constrain non-native speakers from learning and speakingthe language? What of an author or artist who wished to include Aboriginal linguistic material and other motifs in a work?The primary target of an intellectual property right in indigenous languages might turn out to be linguists, who would per-haps be required to obtain a licence to work on or publish about Aboriginal languages. The document quoted above recog-nizes the role of non-Aboriginal linguists in the revival and maintenance of Aboriginal languages, but:

In this phase of language revival, there is the prospect of non-Aboriginal linguists not only instructing communities on therevival of language, but also rooting that instruction in the sacred and secret cultural forms that are central to the identityof those people. Without care, this could be seen as a contemporary variation of the appropriation of Indigenous peoples’life forces exerted by the colonial anthropologists over Indigenous communities throughout Australia.

Linguists involved in data collection in indigenous societies may face opposition based on resistance to the loss of controlover sacred materials which accompanies data storage, and also in relation to the intellectual property rights that arise inthe linguist’s transcriptions and other works (Crystal, 2005, pp. 157–159). University rules governing research with humansubjects generally require written consent for interviewing and archiving of material, and these can be understood as rec-ognizing a form of monopoly ownership through a de facto licencing regime.5

Linguistics is thus in an apparent double-bind. By its affirmation of the Western scientific paradigm, it adopts fundamen-tally rationalist modes of understanding, yet, like anthropology, it is also committed to respect for the beliefs of the culturesand social groups whose languages it studies, and even for advocacy on their behalf. Such groups may hold beliefs about lan-guage which are deeply at variance with the assumptions of linguistics, and may view with incomprehension or hostility theactivities of linguists as they ‘take ownership’ of cultural materials by recording or notating. In copyright law, the thresholdfor ‘originality’ is a low one. A linguist who exercises ‘skill, judgment and labour’ (Torremanns, 2005) in recording, notatingand analyzing, linguistic materials will easily meet that threshold and acquire intellectual property rights in relation to thosematerials.

A further set of issues arise where the language and processes of modern legal systems are co-opted in defence of cul-tures, beliefs and forms of ownership that do not generally recognize these categories, and in turn are not recognised bythem. The assertion of sovereignty or ownership over language of necessity co-opts the language of law and of property own-ership, even though these are originally alien to and often inimical to the cultural belief system which is being defended. It isagainst the background of the involvement of the courts in determining the status of aboriginal land claims that the docu-ment on ‘owning language’, with its framing in intellectual property law, has emerged.

In an article entitled Australia’s Judicial Revolution: Aboriginal Land Rights and the Transformation of Liberalism’,Hinchman and Hinchman (1998) show how a series of court decisions have sought ‘to incorporate the practices, myths,and folkways of ancient, highly traditional peoples into a common law adapted to the needs of an impersonal, rule-bound,market-oriented society’. A late 19th century Privy Council decision stated that Australia ‘consisted of a tract of land prac-tically unoccupied without settled inhabitants or settled law’ and without a system of land tenure at the time of settlement(Cooper v Stuart 1889, p. 291; Hinchman and Hinchman, 1998, p. 29). This is the so-called terra nullius doctrine, which as-serts either the lack of inhabitants or the lack of productive use of land by indigenous inhabitants (Hinchman and Hinchman,1998, p. 29; Godden and Tehan, 2007, p. 272). A landmark case in 1970, Milirrpum v Nabalco, though it ended with the courtdenying that ‘the doctrine of native title’ had ever had a place in Australia as a settled colony, nonetheless introduced intodiscussion arguments and evidence in relation to a form of ownership understood as ‘communal native title’. Subsequently,the law drew on a mixture of statutory reform, the use of the common law instrument of the trust to own land, and the rec-ognition of the existence of ‘native title’ (Mabo v Queensland No 2, 1992). However the Crown by Act of State had acquiredradical title to the territory of Australia and this could not be challenged, even though: ‘Native title, though recognized by thecommon law, is not an institution of the common law and is not alienable by the common law’ (Hinchman and Hinchman,1998, p. 40; Glaskin 2003).

Hinchman and Hinchman see the Australian courts as following the United States in recognizing semi-sovereignty andincorporating ‘expressive elements’ such as custom, religion and tradition, as well as the possibility of a ‘spiritual’ relation-ship to the land. This ownership subsists uneasily along side the traditional Lockean notion that agricultural usage validatesownership of land. Debate and political controversy over these developments focus on the desirability of an innovation with-in common law reasoning to include a new form of lease which does not grant exclusive possession, and the more generalquestion as to whether it is proper to introduce a form of legal segregation whereby one group of citizens is in part subject toa different legal regime than another. In the United States, it may be legal in some limited circumstances for Native Amer-icans to use peyote in ritual contexts, but not for Rastafarians to use marijuana (State of Kansas v Joe McBride and ConnieMcBride, 1998; Renteln, 2004, pp. 73ff.).

In 2001, Maori in New Zealand protested about ‘Bionicle’ figures produced by Lego which used tropes, including language,from Maori culture in combination with Easter Island and Polynesian figures (Coombe, 2003, pp. 1189ff.). One critic of a re-lated website wrote (cited in Coombe and Herman, 2004, p. 564):

5 For a general website on research ethics, see http://www.researchethics.ca/.

C. Hutton / Language Sciences 32 (2010) 638–647 643

Author's personal copy

I am angered and disgusted to see so many Maori words used for nothing other than a kids’ game, pretending to teachothers how to pronounce our language, and looking to a Maori dictionary to make up new names to role-play. What rightdo you have to abuse our tongue? Who of you here are actually Maori?

There has been considerable discussion in weblogs of a reported case where the Mapuche Indians of Chile have accusedMicrosoft of linguistic piracy, and the dilemmas involved in granting a monopoly to a particular group, or its leaders, over itslanguage.6 A useful point of comparison is the attempt in 2008 by the French president Nicolas Sarkozy to obtain an injunc-tion against a voodoo doll in his likeness. Sarkozy argued that he owned his own image, but the court rejected the action,giving precedence to issues of freedom of expression and satire. The court did however rule that the doll must come witha label warning that sticking pins in the toy is an affront to they president’s dignity. Sarkozy’s lawyer generalized this withthe assertion that ‘that sticking pins in an effigy doll is an affront to human dignity’ (Viscusi and Smith, 2008). Is this appealto the principle of self-ownership in any sense comparable with that of the Maori who object to the commodification andenforced hybridization of their culture and language? Should the law distinguish between Nicholas Sarkozy’s ownershipand control of his image and that of the Maori? In relation to the important flag-burning case in the United States, Texasv Johnson (1989), Justice Scalia later commented that the First Amendment ‘protects your right to show contempt’(Goldstein, 2000, p. 228). But the dissenting judges regarded the US flag as a sacred and transcendent symbol, the burningof which should not be afforded the protection given to expressive political speech.

In intellectual property law there are diverse views about the ownership of images that circulate in the public domain.One view has been that commercially created language texts (slogans, jingles, trademarks) should be celebrated and pro-tected in view of their creative agency in relation to popular culture (Richardson, 2004, p. 196). Against this, it has beenargued that since the public is one of the authors of celebrity, it is also a co-owner in some sense of the celebrity’s image;similarly trademarks are not merely the creations of their owners. Celebrity images and brands are the co-creation of thepublic sphere, historical memory and popular culture (Carty, 2004, pp. 249–251). In the case of the culture and heritageof small-scale or ‘face-to-face’ societies, this debate might seem beside the point, as the consumers of traditional culturehave been conventionally understood to have been also its creators. But once there is a systematic interaction betweenthe culture of traditional societies and modern mass consumer culture, then not only does the circulation of images escapethe previous mechanisms of control and traditional authority, but in order to assert or restore ‘traditional’ forms of control,the cultural norms themselves must be represented to law in terms that law can understand and recognize.

This may involve the adaptation of some existing legal mechanism such as the legal incorporation of the tribe, as in theUnited States (see French, 2003), a process which will also inevitably transform and restructure the nature of the group, andrequire a legally-precise definition of membership:

The term ‘Indian’ as used in this Act shall include all persons of Indian descent who are members of any recognized Indiantribe now under Federal jurisdiction, and all persons who are descendants of such members who were, on June 1, 1934,residing within the present boundaries of any Indian reservation, and shall further include all other persons of one-half ormore Indian blood. [. . .] The term ‘tribe’ wherever used in this Act shall be construed to refer to any Indian tribe, organizedband, pueblo, or the Indians residing on one reservation.7

These ‘Indians’ would be the native speakers of the respective tribal language, understood as a biological descent group. Theyare stakeholders in the language rather than native speakers as defined within conventional linguistic theory, since these‘native speakers’ may not actually control the full range of skills associated with the traditional linguistic culture. While itis law that now co-creates the relevant tribal identity, the tribe has considerable freedom to propose and enforce its owndefinitions, including whether to apply a certain ‘blood quantum’ threshold or other criteria (Garroutte, 2001). The paradoxof this turn to law has been analyzed as follows (Riles, 2004, p. 777):

If anthropological analyses have traditionally sought to broaden the scope of recognized ownership forms beyond thelawyer’s narrow understanding of property, however, the renewed significance of property as an ethnographic subjectresults from the fact that people in many regions of the world have come to identify the products of their creative workin precisely the neoliberal, lawyerly language of property in a bid to endow these creations with visibility under the law.

The turning to law on the part of anthropologists, language rights theorists and indigenous rights activists invokes moderncommon law notions of property in order to assert or reinstate a notion of culture as owned by the ethnos. The negotiationand interaction with legal modernity requires that labels and categories to be defined in a manner interpretable by law. Thisturning to law requires a formal account of agency. As with the company model, the corporate person requires a way to orga-nize and authenticate agents to act on its behalf in the social, commercial and legal world, and to assert and defend its prop-erty rights. In other words, it must give an account of authority structures within the ethnic group or tribe, and accord special

6 See posts by Mark Liberman, Language as property?, November 24, 2006, http://www.itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003819.html, Shouldthe ‘‘owners” of a language be permitted to forbid its use to criticize them?, December 13, 2006, http://wwww.itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003907.html; Tom Honeyman, When language met law, 24 November, 2006, http://www.blogs.usyd.edu.au/elac/2006/11/language_meets_law.html, and JaneSimpson, Sovereignty over languages and land, 25 November, 2006, http://www.blogs.usyd.edu.au/elac/2006/11/sovereignty_over_languages_and_1.html.

7 United States Code, Title 25, Chapter 14, Subchapter V, section 479.

644 C. Hutton / Language Sciences 32 (2010) 638–647

Author's personal copy

recognition to particular elders as agents or privileged stakeholders. Names of languages, the boundaries among indigenouslanguages, the boundary between indigenous languages and other languages such as English, the identity of the nativespeakers and of the community which collectively owns this ‘mother tongue’, would have to be defined. This produces anapparent regression to biological and organicist metaphors, and to the originally European identity discourse of mother ton-gue and native speaker: ‘The language ideology of legal anthropology appears to have affinities with 19th century philology’(Maurer, 2003, p. 778).

To which one could add: and also to late nineteenth century race theory. The fact that difficult questions of definition andclassification does not itself preclude the intervention of law, as law is very frequently concerned with drawing difficultboundaries and with competing reifications. Almost all contemporary scholarship denies the existence of race as a category,yet race is recognized in a variety of ways by law and government. Similarly, language planning legislation recognizes theexistence of distinct and definable languages and language rights, though ‘on the ground’ it is impossible to determine whereone language ends and another begins (Blackledge and Creese, 2008), or even identify a unitary entity ‘language’.

6. The politics of linguistics

Traditional societies by definition do not have a notion of intellectual property rights, but in their confrontation with statemodernity and modern legal systems they have the possibility of recourse to law and the forms of ownership that it recog-nizes. This involves also recourse to a language ideology with its origins in northern Europe, based on mother tongue, nativespeaker, Romantic authenticity, and a notion of common descent or ‘blood’. This ideology is shaped by hostility to the iden-tity displacements caused by modern urbanization, capitalism, and now globalization. The paradox of the mother tongue–native speaker model of linguistic identity is that it begins with the assumption of its own uniform applicability: its defenceof cultural difference actually requires the imposition of a context-free, pre-packaged ideology.

The liberal model of language looks to an ideal of language as an open space, which is only privatized or legally ownedonly to the extent justified by the operation of commercial principles, and controlled by defamation law in order to protectits status as an open medium, but which as a matter of principle is not under any form of central control. The idea of an eth-nic group having any form of monopoly right over a language would be rejected on grounds of free speech and open access.However the idea of a free and transparent public sphere to all is both theoretically and sociologically vulnerable to chal-lenge. It occludes the local politics of social domains such as the family, institutions (education, government, church), media;the law itself is an immense and complex system of linguistic control. It further brackets out the whole host of issues that fallunder the politics of interpersonal communication.

The mother tongue as monopoly ownership is generally viewed as reactionary when asserted as a dominant, majoritariandiscourse within modern, urban societies (e.g. ‘English only’), given its denial of basic tenets of free speech ideology found inthe liberal view. But this idea is seen as increasingly progressive as we move down the continuum towards endangeredlanguages and historically victimized or marginalized face-to-face ethnic communities. The language of ‘blood ties’ whenused to define a group in terms of racial community or descent lines operates along a similar continuum. This reificationof racial and cultural identity could be understood within what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has termed ‘strategic essential-ism’ (Spivak, 1987, pp. 206–7). The use of such strategic arguments shifts the debate to an argument about political aims: theessentialist strategy is justified by the progressive cause. But questions of agency and representation remain highly problem-atic, given the diversity of understandings of particular identities, their problematic boundaries, and potential resistance totheir reification: ‘A right to group difference may be experienced as meddlesome at best and oppressive at worst even bysome members of the groups that the rights regime ostensibly benefits’ (Ford, 2005, pp. 25).

7. Conclusion: is there a politics of integrational linguistics?

Many legal theorists would agree that property is ‘a socially constructed concept’, in that ideas about property ‘shift andchange over time and in accordance with social, political and economic developments’ (George, 2005, p. 795). Even thoughproperty may be understood as a construct, it is nonetheless possible to regulate it through law. Linguists have treatedlanguages as alternately socially, psychologically, or biologically defined, as real systems in one of these domains, if notin all. Few linguists have fully embraced the integrationist idea of a language as construct, as the product of a ‘language myth’(Harris, 1981), and as a professionally generated fiction, illusion, invention or construct (Harris, 1998, p. 56; Makoni andPennycook, 2007). Recognition that languages are constructs does not preclude regulation by law, as the example of propertylaw shows. A rejection of the essentialist terminology of academic linguistics, by treating languages as ‘myths’ or ‘constructs’,potentially clears a space to provide ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, 1973) of how language politics operates both to reify anddeconstruct linguistic phenomena. Further, this move raises a set of complex questions about the socio-political effects of the‘language myth’ itself, and how it operates in the law, in education, lexicography, media and so on (Harris, 2002; Harris andHutton, 2007). It offers a critique of Western linguistics, including language rights discourse, as ethnocentric (Harris, 1998,p. 57). This implies a rejection of a global model of language politics, a single metalinguistic vocabulary, and set of principlesthat can be applied regardless of socio-political context.

Is there a positive language politics that goes together with this intellectual position? Integrational linguistics is lay-ori-ented, seeing speakers as ‘language-makers’ (Harris, 1980), and recognizing the validity and primacy of lay experience of

C. Hutton / Language Sciences 32 (2010) 638–647 645

Author's personal copy

language. Integrational linguistics understands authority and ownership over language to be diffused and decentralized.There are discernable strands of popularism, libertarianism, individualism and voluntarism, but these are implicit ratherthan fully argued positions (Hutton, 1997, p. 54). Integrational linguistics might better be considered as a ‘metapolitics’,in that it opens up the politics of metalanguage, directing our attention to issues of fictionality, reification, and issues of lan-guage expertise, ownership and control (Hutton, 2009).

Questions raised by intellectual property law have been illustrated here in relation to the clash between the liberal under-standing of language and the Romantic-organicist ideal of collective self-ownership. However neither the idea of an openpublic sphere which serves as a market-of-ideas nor the politics of Volk are adequate to the intellectual challenges thatwe face today. Ultimately this clash is not between modern urban societies and traditional ones: it is a schism within moder-nity itself. Intellectual property law constitutes one of the key forums within which global issues of ownership, culture,agency, information and control will be worked out in the 21st century. Given that language issues will remain at the veryheart of these debates, intellectual property in the widest sense of that concept should be of central concern to linguistictheory as it evolves in the information age.

Acknowledgement

An earlier draft of paper was presented at The Native Speaker and the Mother Tongue conference held in Cape Town,December 11–13, 2008. My thanks go to the organizers and to an external referee who provided helpful suggestions forfurther secondary sources. This paper was supported by RGC-GRF Grant HKU 744708H.

References

Bainbridge, David, 2007. Intellectual Property, sixth ed. Pearson Education, Harlow, Essex.Blackledge, Adrian, Creese, Angela, 2008. Contesting ‘Language’ as ‘Heritage’: negotiation of identities in late modernity. Applied Linguistics 29 (4), 533–554.Bolton, Kingsley, Hutton, Christopher, 2000. Orientalism, linguistics and postcolonial studies. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2

(1), 1–5.Campos, Paul, 1998. Jurismania: The Madness of American Law. Oxford University Press, New York.Carty, Hazel, 2004. Advertising, publicity rights and English law. Intellectual Property Quarterly 3, 209–258.Chong, Debra, 2009. Cautious celebrations over ‘Allah’ judgment. Herald Malaysia Online, December 31, 2009. <http://www.heraldmalaysia.com/news>

(accessed 12.01.10).Coombe, Rosemary, 2003. Fear, hope and longing for the future of authorship and a revitalized public domain in global regimes of intellectual property.

DePaul Law Review 52, 1171–1191.Coombe, Rosemary, Herman, Andrew, 2004. Rhetorical virtues: property, speech, and the commons on the world-wide web. Anthropological Quarterly 77

(3), 559–574.Crystal, David, 2005. Language Death. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Dan-Cohen, Meir, 2002. Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality. Princeton University Press, Princeton.Dor, Daniel, 2004. From englishization to imposed multilingualism: globalization, the internet, and the political economy of the linguistic code. Public

Culture 16 (1), 97–118.Ellis, Geoffrey., 2003. The Napoleonic Empire, second ed. Palgrave MacMillan, London.Finnis, John, 2002. Natural law: the classical tradition. In: Coleman, Jules, Shapiro, Scott (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of

Law. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 1–60.Ford, Richard Thompson, 2005. Racial Culture: A Critique. Princeton University Press, Princeton.French, Laurence, 2003. Native American Justice. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham Maryland.Garroutte, Eva Marie, 2001. The racial formation of American Indians: negotiating legitimate identities within tribal and federal law. American Indian

Quarterly 25 (2), 224–239.Geertz, Clifford, 1973. Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture. In: The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. Basic Books, New York,

pp. 3–30.George, Alexandra, 2005. The difficulty of defining ‘Property’. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 25, 793–813.Glaskin, Katie, 2003. Native title and the ‘Bundle of Rights’ model: implications for the recognition of aboriginal relations to country. Anthropological Forum

13 (1), 67–88.Godden, Lee, Tehan, Maureen, 2007. Translating native title to individual title in Australia: are real property forms and indigenous interests reconcilable? In:

Cooke, Elizabeth (Ed.), Modern Studies in Property Law, vol. 4. Hart, Oxford and Portland, pp. 263–294.Goldstein, Robert Justin, 2000. Flag Burning and Free Speech: The Case of Texas v Johnson. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas.Graham, Phil, 2006. Hypercapitalism: New Media, Language, and Social Perceptions of Value. Peter Lang, New York.Grazia, Margreta de, 1994. Sanctioning voice: Quotation Marks, the Abolition of Torture, and the Fifth Amendment. In: Woodmansee, Martha, Jaszi, Peter

(Eds.), The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Duke University Press, Durham and London, pp. 281–302.Gray, Kevin, Gray, Susan, 2005. Elements of Land Law, fourth ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Harris, Roy, 1980. The Language-Makers. Duckworth, London.Harris, Roy, 1981. The Language Myth. Duckworth, London.Harris, Roy, 1998. Introduction to Integrational Linguistics. Pergamon, Oxford.Harris, Roy (Ed.), 2002. The Language Myth in Western Culture. Curzon, Richmond.Harris, Roy, Hutton, Christopher, 2007. Definition in Theory and Practice. Language, Lexicography and the Law. Continuum, London.Hinchman, Lewis P., Hinchman, Sandra K., 1998. Australia’s judicial revolution: aboriginal land rights and the transformation of liberalism. Polity 31 (1), 23–

51.Hutton, Christopher, 1997. The ‘Dictator of Taste’: rules, regularities and responsibilities. Language Sciences 19, 47–55.Hutton, Christopher, 2005. Race and the Third Reich. Polity, Cambridge.Hutton, Christopher, 2009. Language, Meaning and the Law. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.Iwai, K., 1999. Persons, things and corporations: the corporate personality controversy and comparative corporate governance. The American Journal of

Comparative Law 47, 583–632.Johnson, Sally., 2005. Spelling Trouble? Language, Ideology and the Reform of German Orthography. Multilingual Matters Ltd., Clevedon.Klein, Naomi, 1999. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Picador, New York.Landes, William M., Posner, Richard A., 2003. Indefinitely renewable copyright. The University of Chicago Law Review 70, 471–518.

646 C. Hutton / Language Sciences 32 (2010) 638–647

Author's personal copy

Le Page, Robert, Andrée, Tabouret-Keller, 1985. Acts of Identity: Creole Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge University Press,Cambridge.

Locke, John, 2001. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Batoche Books, Ontario, Canada (first published, 1690).Makoni, Sinfree, Pennycook, Alistair, 2007. Disinventing and reconstituting languages. In: Makoni, Sinfree, Pennycook, Alistair (Eds.), Disinventing and

Reconstituting Languages. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, pp. 1–41.Maurer, Bill, 2003. Got language? Law, property and the anthropological imagination. American Anthropologist 105 (4), 775–781.Morris, Thomas D., 1996. Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.Morrison, Mary Jane, 1989. Excursions into the nature of legal language. Cleveland State Law Review 37 (2), 271–336.Netanel, Neil, 2008. Copyright’s Paradox. Oxford University Press, Oxford.[Owning Language], 2007. Copyright, Ethics and the Development of Aboriginal Language Programs, http://www.aare.edu.au/01pap/low01352.htm

(accessed 17.12.07).Posner, Richard, 1983. The Economics of Justice. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Pretto-Sakmann, Arianna, 2005. Boundaries of Personal Property. Hart, Oxford and Portland, Oregon.Renteln, Alison Dundes, 2004. The Cultural Defence. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Richardson, Megan, 2004. Trade marks and language. Sydney Law Review 26, 193–220.Rigsby, B., Sutton, P., 1982. Speech communities in aboriginal Australia. Anthropological Forum 5 (1), 8–23.Riles, Annelise, 2004. Property as legal knowledge: means and ends. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS) 10, 775–795.Scafidi, Susan, 2005. Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 1987. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. Methuen, London.Torremanns, Paul, 2005. Intellectual Property Law, fourth ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Vandevelde, Kenneth J., 1980. The new property of the 19th century: the development of the modern concept of property. Buffalo Law Review 29, 325–367.von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 1830. Hermann und Dorothea. Vieweg, Braunschweig.Viscusi, Gregory, Smith, Heather, 2008. Voodoo Dolls Must Be Sold With Warning Label (Update1), November 28, 2008. <http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/

news> (accessed 09.12.08).Widdowson, Henry G., 1994. The ownership of English. TESOL Quarterly 28, 377–389.

Further reading

Cases Mentioned

BVerfG, 1 BvR 1640/97 vom 14.7.1998, Absatz-Nr. (1-170), <http://www.bverfg.de/entscheidungen/rs19980714_1bvr164097.html>.Camden (Marquis) v Inland Revenue Commissioners [1914] 1 KB 641.Cooper v Stuart, 1889. 14 App. Cas. 286.Deringer v Plate 29 Cal. 292, 1865.Mabo v Queensland (No. 2), 1992. 175 CLR 1.Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd., 1971. 17 FLR 141.Millington v Fox 3 Myl & C 338, 1838.Perfection: Joseph Crosfield and Sons’ Application, 1909. 26 RPC 837.R (on the application of E) (Respondent) v Governing Body of JFS and the Admissions Appeal Panel of JFS (Appellants) and others R (on the application of E)

(Respondent) v Governing Body of JFS and the Admissions Appeal Panel of JFS and others (United Synagogue) (Appellants) [2009] UKSC 15.Robertson v Rochester Folding Box Co 171 N.Y. 538, 1902.State of Kansas v Joe McBride and Connie McBride 24 Kan. App. 2d 909, 1998.The Eastman Photographic Materials Co. v Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs, and Trade-Marks [1898] A. C. 571.Texas v Johnson 491 US 397, 1989.Van Horne’s Lessee v Dorrance 2 U.S. 304 (1795), 2 U.S. 304 (Dall.).

Statutes

American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978) 42 U.S.C. 1996, Amendments (1994) 42 U.S.C. 1996a.The Statute of Anne (1709) 8 Anne c.19.The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act (2007) c.19.United States Code, Title 25, c. 14.

C. Hutton / Language Sciences 32 (2010) 638–647 647