Hi, I'm Tilden "Tilly" Brooks

Welcome to my website! I'm a Ph.D. student in Linguistics at Stanford and J.D. candidate at Yale Law School exploring the intersection of linguistics and law. I have a wide range of interests in both fields including semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, legal interpretation, civil rights, evidence, and criminal justice.

Prior to attending Stanford, I received a BA in linguistics from Yale College, where I pursued Indo-European philology before uncovering an interest in impact-focused research and the relationship between language and law. Drawn both to the effects of law and policy decisions on marginalized linguistic communities and the application of linguistic theories, research methods, and tools to interpretive legal processes, my work involves both the law of language and the language of law.

Although much of my work is related to how linguistics can be leveraged in the practice of law, I believe the integrated study of law and linguistics can be beneficial for both fields. The language of the law, like other instantiations of natural language can (and should) be systematically studied by linguists. Because the language of the law is so distinctive, legal texts are a rich source of data for linguistic inquiry. In my own work, I have found linguistic phenomena in statutory sources that have not yet been described in the semantics literature. It is my hope that continued investivation of the law from the perspective of linguistics will result in meaningful developments to lingusitic theory.

In the long term, I hope aims to draw communities of legal scholars, linguists, and legal practitioners together with the common goals of advancing linguistic justice in the practice of law, refining the use of linguistic evidence and tools for law and policy purposes, and using linguistic data from legal sources to advance our understanding of natural language.