Where linguistics meets the law
In this episode of KHS's Imagine A World podcast, hosts Tanajia Moye-Green (2024 cohort) and Ashley Yeh (2024 cohort) speak with Tilly Brooks (2024 cohort) about her interdisciplinary work at the intersection of linguistics, law, and justice. Tilly shares her path from studying ancient languages to examining how meaning is constructed in legal texts, why ambiguity and “ordinary meaning” shape legal outcomes, and how linguistic expertise can inform legal reform.
Resources
Guest
Tilly Brooks, from New Haven, Connecticut, is pursuing a PhD in linguistics at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. She is concurrently pursuing a JD at Yale Law School. Prior to attending Stanford, she received a BA in linguistics from Yale College, where she pursued Indo-European philology before uncovering an interest in action-based research and the relationship between language and law.
Focusing both on 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, Tilly researches what she calls “the law of language and the language of law.” In the long term, she 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, and refining the use of linguistic evidence and tools for law and policy purposes.
Imagine A World team
Imagine A World's theme music was composed and recorded by Taylor Goss (2021 cohort). The podcast was originally conceived and led by Briana Mullen (2020 cohort), Taylor Goss, and Willie Thompson (2022 cohort), along with Daniel Gajardo (2020 cohort) and Jordan Conger (2020 cohort).
Knight-Hennessy scholars represent a vast array of cultures, perspectives, and experiences. While we as an organization are committed to elevating their voices, the views expressed are those of the scholars, and not necessarily those of KHS.
Full transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.
Tilly Brooks:
If you're interested in language specifically, really consider that being in law and linguistics is so exciting because there's so much to do and so much richness. There are many, many things that have not even been approached yet. And not because they're not good ideas, but because people haven't done it yet.
Hi, I'm Tilly Brooks. I'm a member of the 2024 cohort and doing a JD and a PhD in linguistics. I imagine a world where we get serious about law and language.
Ashley Yeh:
Welcome to the Imagine A World podcast from Knight-Hennessy Scholars. We are here to give you a glimpse into the Knight-Hennessy Scholar community of graduate students, all seven Stanford schools, including Business, Education, Engineering, Humanities, Law, Medicine, and Sustainability. In each episode, we talk with scholars about the world they imagine and what they are doing to bring it to life.
Today, we'll be chatting with Tilly, a second year PhD student, rising second year law student, and Bananagrams enthusiast who envisions a world where we get serious about law and language. Our guest co-host is Tanajia. Tanajia is a second year sociology PhD and a 2024 Knight-Hennessy Scholar. She is a friend and collaborator of Tilly. And stay tuned for the story on how Tilly discovered her passion for law and linguistics.
Hello, everyone. My name is Ashley and I will be your host today for Imagine A World. I am a 2024 scholar and a PhD in neuroscience, and today I am very excited to be with a first-time co-host, Tanajia. I'll let her introduce herself.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
First, I'd like to say they got me, y'all. Usually I work on-
Ashley Yeh:
Yes, we did.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
... behind the scenes stuff for this podcast.
Ashley Yeh:
I'm very excited.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
But yeah, my name's Tanajia Moye-Green. That's my government name. I'm a member of the 2024 cohort along with Ashley here and the guest who... Oh, our girl, Tilly. Woo. I'm sorry, I forgot she introduced herself. But yeah, super excited to chat.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah, super excited for another member of the 2024 cohort. This time, Tilly is a linguistics PhD. And I'm very excited because I know nothing about linguistics and I want to hear more. Before we talk about the world you imagine, let's talk about the world you were born into and have experienced thus far. Where are you from and what was your journey here?
Tilly Brooks:
I'm from Southern Connecticut and New York City. I'm a proud Connecion.
Ashley Yeh:
I didn't know you call yourselves Connecion.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
They have cool names.
Tilly Brooks:
Yes. The official term is Nutmegger, but I've been workshopping some new words for people from Connecticut.
Ashley Yeh:
Where does Nutmegger come from?
Tilly Brooks:
Connecticut's the Nutmeg State.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
I love that.
Ashley Yeh:
Oh, I see.
Tilly Brooks:
The Nutmeggers. I actually don't remember ever seeing a nutmeg plant growing up, but somewhere in Connecticut-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
This is important.
Ashley Yeh:
There's a nutmeg field somewhere.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Screaming.
Tilly Brooks:
I can't say that that part of Connecticut is New Haven, which is where I grew up. But somewhere in Connecticut, this is an important part. Both of my parents are from Connecticut. My dad moved to the US from Jamaica when he was a child and my mom grew up here, or in Connecticut. That's where I'm from. It's an important part of my identity. And California has been very different. But to give a little bit more context on how I ended up here specifically, I guess I can just start a little bit at the beginning. Like a lot of linguists, I got started with the field because I was really into language. I had the opportunity to learn Latin when I was in high school and I loved it. It was awesome.
Ashley Yeh:
Oh, wow. That is a rare take.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
That's a flex.
Ashley Yeh:
That's a very rare-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Casual flex.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah.
Tilly Brooks:
I think a lot of people have a sort of tough time learning Latin, partly because the way that it's taught is very different from how modern languages are taught. You spend a lot less time on listening and speaking comprehension and you get a lot more in the weeds on syntax in particular, which I love because it requires certain levels of metalinguistic awareness, which is kind of awareness about the language that you're using as you do it, that isn't necessarily taught or necessary for language acquisition when you're learning for speaking purposes.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
This is so cool.
Ashley Yeh:
When you're learning Latin, and I'm sure there's a lot of roots of words you recognize from English, is that what you're talking about when you say metalinguistic knowledge?
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah. I guess a metalinguistic awareness, it could be in any language really. When you think about this habits that you have as a speaker, when you start to talk faster, slower, things you tend to do, or even knowledge about the grammar of your language that isn't really something that you learn in school, all of those are examples of metalinguistic awareness. It's just sort of your knowledge about your language.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
So were these things you were thinking about before you got into studying Latin or were these things that Latin made you more aware of and made you interested, I guess, in linguistics?
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah, I think it came more as I started to learn Latin because you spend a lot of time, especially in the early stages, just doing rote memorization. So many tables. And Latin is kind of interesting because for me, Latin is a synthetic language compared to languages like English, modern English, which tend to rely a lot more on word order. But in Latin, you have a lot of word forms that change. It's more morphosyntactically complex in certain respects.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Wow.
Tilly Brooks:
So I'll give you an example.
Ashley Yeh:
[inaudible 00:06:02].
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah. I guess essentially-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
It's okay.
Tilly Brooks:
If you think about these words I and me, right? These mean the same thing, but you use them in different contexts, right? You use I if it's a subject and me if it's an indirect object or direct object, for example. The difference between those two things is case. So Latin has that, but for most nouns, for all nouns, actually. So if you say the word dog, the specific form that you use for dog it appears in a bunch of different forms depending on what role syntactically the word is in the sentence. So you could imagine I and me, but instead of just two forms, there are 10, right?
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Oh my.
Tilly Brooks:
And all nouns do this. So Latin has five cases-
Ashley Yeh:
There's 10?
Tilly Brooks:
Yes. So there are five cases and singular, plural forms.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
This is so cool.
Tilly Brooks:
And then adjectives have to agree. So it's very cool because Latin, it's just a natural language, like all other natural languages, but it's very different than English. So what really kicked off my passion is that I started to do more comparative approaches to language because I got the chance a few years later to start learning Ancient Greek. And one thing about how Ancient Greek is taught, if you already know Latin, it's easy to pick up Ancient Greek because it's often taught by analogy. So I remember very vividly, I learned the alphabet, I learned the first two declensions in Greek, and you can think of declensions kind of like conjugations, but for nouns. This is the I versus me thing.
Ashley Yeh:
Like tense or... Yeah, okay.
Tilly Brooks:
Mm-hmm. But for nouns, and adjectives technically. But I learned the Greek alphabet and then they gave me a paragraph and said, "Okay, now read this."
Tanajia Moye-Green:
"Oh, that's easy. New words."
Tilly Brooks:
And I got a headache because I wasn't familiar enough with the Greek alphabet yet. And then the day after, I read the paragraph. It was fine. It was cool. And so this kicked off a huge passion for me essentially. I started learning as many ancient Indo-European languages as I could. And when you get the chance to study a lot of related languages altogether at the same time, you really start to see the sort of systematicities of language and you start to look for it. So I remember I started to have these charts of sort of, "Okay, this sounds like this one, which is like this one, which is like this one." And I started to really be able to do etymology off the dome, which was super cool.
And I remember I had a professor who also did this because he's a philologist, and I met him in my middle Persian class, and I'll tell you about that in just a moment. But he would sometimes, he might forget a word in like Middle Persian, for example. There are actually three varieties of Middle Persian.
Ashley Yeh:
Middle Persian?
Tilly Brooks:
Mm-hmm.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
I know. I'm amazed.
Ashley Yeh:
So what, like-
Tilly Brooks:
Actually, maybe I'll tell you about-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
I'm just learning right now. Tilly's teaching.
Tilly Brooks:
I'll tell you about the language, okay, and then I'll tell you about Kevin, this professor who was so amazing. So I started undergrad and I was committed to learning as many ancient Indo-European languages as possible.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
At the same time as class, right?
Tilly Brooks:
Yes. So these were my classes.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Oh, great. [inaudible 00:09:06] thought you were just learning this in [inaudible 00:09:08] time.
Tilly Brooks:
I mean, I was taking a lot of other classes also, but-
Ashley Yeh:
I was wondering, like most people, at least in my high school, everyone was taking like Chinese, Spanish, the basic languages, I guess. What drew you to...
Tilly Brooks:
No language is basic.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Basic for me. All right.
Tilly Brooks:
No, no, but seriously though, no language is basic. I mean, the most amazing things about language is that it's a recursive system. It's sort of like discreetly infinite. And these things are true of all natural languages. So there's a lot of diversity typologically in the world's languages. And Latin is very different, not just because it is actually different from how... I mean, Spanish is a romance language that is a very close descendant of Latin, for example, and French too. But yeah, I mean, some of the biggest differences actually come up because of how it's taught rather than how different it is as a natural language, in my opinion. And there are some major differences too.
Ashley Yeh:
I sure would be different. Yeah, because I feel like, I mean, Chinese and Spanish, they're, I mean, very widely spoken everywhere. But with Latin and Ancient Greek, it's not as easily practiced. So I'm also wondering, do you learn these languages, and me, for example, I learned, I, quote, "learned" Spanish in high school and elementary-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Me too, girl, me too.
Ashley Yeh:
... and then I never used it and it kind of like fell away. Do you feel that way about Greek and Latin?
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah. Well, so I guess I'll say I also took Spanish in high school. I just did three languages.
Ashley Yeh:
Wow. Wow. Wow. [inaudible 00:10:51].
Tilly Brooks:
I only did Spanish for two years because I was so passionate about the ancient languages. I wish I had stuck with it. I'm learning Spanish now. But yeah, I mean, I think pedagogically it's a very different experience to learn Latin and Ancient Greek. It was a big emphasis on reading and writing and almost no listening comprehension or very few people actually speak Latin or Ancient Greek. There's a TV show where the characters speak Ancient Greek.
Ashley Yeh:
Oh wow.
Tilly Brooks:
If you know the TV show, Young Justice, the Atlantians are speaking Ancient Greek, which-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
I'm going to tune in.
Ashley Yeh:
Very cool.
Tilly Brooks:
I just happened to notice it one day. I was just sitting, and it's very interesting because actually they speak Ancient Greek. I don't know who they had as a consultant on, but they have digamma. So a digamma is a letter in Ancient Greek, it looks kind of like a capital F, but it's part of like very old forms of Ancient Greek. So Attic Greek is usually the kind of Ancient Greek that you learn first during school, that's the most commonly taught version. And it doesn't have the digamma anymore, that dropped out of the language by then.
Ashley Yeh:
digamma, okay.
Tilly Brooks:
So it sounds like a W, so you can hear it because it's not a super common sound to hear, especially at the beginning of a word In Ancient Greek, but the Atlantians in Young Justice uses digamma. Anyway, it was very funny because one time I was just watching this show and I said, "Are they? They're speaking Ancient Greek. That's weird."
Tanajia Moye-Green:
"Wait, I know this song."
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah. But yeah, I love ancient languages and that was my inroad into linguistics. So when I started undergrad, I went in with the goal of learning as many ancient Indo-European languages as I could. And I was lucky enough to be somewhere where there were actually quite a few options. And so I had-
Ashley Yeh:
Where were you?
Tilly Brooks:
I went to Yale for undergrad and they have actually quite a few philologists. So I got the chance to study with some amazing people. I did Latin and Ancient Greek and then classical Sanskrit, old English, so Middle English, Manichaean, Middle Persian-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Oh my.
Tilly Brooks:
Parthian. And a little bit of [inaudible 00:12:54].
Tanajia Moye-Green:
I don't know what's going on anymore.
Ashley Yeh:
I didn't even know some of these were [inaudible 00:13:01]
Tilly Brooks:
And I remember, especially when I was in my Middle Persian and Parthian class, the professor let me in because normally for a lot of philologists, and this is true of philologists, classicists, people who do historical linguistics, depending on the kind of historical linguistics they do, you have to know French and German because a lot of the texts that you need to read are in French and German. I never learned those two languages. When I took this Middle Persian, Parthian class, I remember I was 19 at the time, terrified of everything still, and the professor let me in anyway because I'd had a couple other ancient languages under my belt already that I was pretty comfortable with.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah, a lot of ancient languages, it sounds like.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Yeah. Let's [inaudible 00:13:43] come on in.
Ashley Yeh:
Seasoned veteran of ancient languages.
Tilly Brooks:
I remember the textbook was entirely in German, no translations available. And I was the only student in the class who couldn't read German and also the youngest by far. So I show up to this class terrified. And then Kevin, this is the professor's name, he put me at ease a little bit. And then the first assignment we learned the script, which is sort of Manichaean, Middle Persian, I believe it was sort of a kind of cursive variety of like the Babylonian Aramaic script. So kind of interesting because that Aramaic is part of the Afroasiatic family. It's not Indo-European, so I'd never been exposed to this kind of writing system before. I love learning new scripts. So I actually have bad handwriting, but I'm much better-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Your handwriting is gorgeous.
Tilly Brooks:
Oh, it's pretty bad. But it's much better-
Ashley Yeh:
Hey, Tanajia, what's the real take? It's gorgeous?
Tanajia Moye-Green:
I'll give you the take.
Ashley Yeh:
Okay, I believe you.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Tilly's handwriting is gorgeous. And I also just... Tilly, thank you. I feel like I am learning. This is lecture. It's amazing. And I too love languages. Communication's important and stuff.
Tilly Brooks:
It is.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
And I also, yeah, I really enjoyed learning Swahili and French and Spanish and in the past lives I've lived. What I'm curious about is you're doing this dual degree-
Tilly Brooks:
Oh yeah.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Where does law come in?
Tilly Brooks:
Can I answer the dual degree question after I finish the story of the class though?
Ashley Yeh:
Yes, of course. [inaudible 00:15:11].
Tanajia Moye-Green:
It's like, "When is the law coming in?"
Tilly Brooks:
I'll write the script.
Ashley Yeh:
That was good, that was good.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
That was good, that was a good segue.
Ashley Yeh:
That was a good segue. Excellent.
Tilly Brooks:
It's just the part I wanted to tell you about Kevin because-
Ashley Yeh:
No, tell us. Tell us.
Tilly Brooks:
My professor, I was terrified of everything, but this professor was super welcoming because he had had this experience when he was the student of kind of being ushered into this really frightening class as an undergrad and it put him onto the path to where he is now. So he did the same for me. And I was horrified. So we learned the script and then he gave me a manuscript. It was pictures of a manuscript. If you've ever seen a manuscript before, this sort of really, really old and an ancient language, these are very difficult to read. And so the first part is even figure out what the letters are on the page. And so mind you, I had just learned the alphabet. It's actually technically not an alphabet, it's a different kind of writing system. But we'll call it... I just learned the writing system, and then I get this manuscript to translate. And I did it. I had to learn because-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Period. Never doubted it.
Tilly Brooks:
... I had to stick around in the class. But it was a lot of fun. It was really hard. I didn't use the textbook. But it's okay, everybody was really nice to me. And the dictionary was in English. Luckily. We had a [inaudible 00:16:40] English.
Ashley Yeh:
At least you had that.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Yeah. At least.
Tilly Brooks:
But I guess the point was just to be in this community of people who were all doing what I was doing. There's something really amazing that happens when you get the chance to study a bunch of languages all together because you start to see the patterns in a very specific way. So I remember this professor, whenever he would forget a word in one language, he would just think of it in another and he would actually just derive it because the languages that he knew were related to each other and derived from each other. So he could kind of sometimes even figure out what the right word was just from knowing it in another language.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Whoa.
Tilly Brooks:
But yeah, I'm not really a philologist anymore, if you hadn't noticed. So I did pivot in a pretty big way, about halfway through undergrad.
Ashley Yeh:
Now you can ask your question.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Mm-mm, we're leaving that in. You just go ahead and answer it. You're good. I can't remember what I asked.
Tilly Brooks:
No, no. Okay. I was in my second year of undergrad and I managed to get a job as a research assistant with a professor at the Law School and we were working on non-binding international arrangements.
Ashley Yeh:
What are non-binding international arrangements? That sounds very mysterious.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
For real, it sounded menacing.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
It's like, "Okay."
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah, so they're kind of what they sound like a little bit, to a certain extent. So there are different ways that parts of the government can do things with other states, as in other nations, and non-governmental organizations based outside of the United States. So you hear about treaties, Article II treaties is kind of the canonical way to go about international lawmaking as we think about it in the US. But it's a process. It's a long process. You need a super majority in the Senate to get an Article II treaty passed. The president has the ability to unilaterally withdraw from Article II treaties. And there are a lot of questions associated with how it works.
So one thing that we also see often is the formation of non-binding international arrangements. And often what will happen with this is that federal agencies may go to sort of their equivalent in another state and work out something that doesn't involve explicitly the creation of obligations under international law or the commitment of funds, but does involve some sort of expression of intent to do certain things. And because they're not sort of the kind of international lawmaking that involves commitment at the same level of an Article II treaty, they're easier and faster to get through. And we see a lot of international lawmaking in this form recently. And there are some other forms too.
Ashley Yeh:
So is it like if two countries want to talk but not make it an official thing, they have these non-binding little conversations, but the treaty is like a official-
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah. I mean, so I guess in principle, that would be an example of one. The kind that I would see a lot, you might think like a statement of intent between, say, NASA and Canada's equivalent of NASA. That could be sort of an example. And the big difference is these are not supposed to create obligations under international... Oh, that's what we mean when they say they're not binding, and they're not supposed to involve the commitment of funds. And this is really important because there's specific procedures involved with when you're actually allowed to do that. So we were looking at these non-bindings and one part of my job involved looking at sort of cues of legal obligation within the texts of these non-bindings. So I spent a lot of time looking for "shall" in these documents. And this is where I kind of made the pivot to doing semantics.
So semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It's one of the two big fields in linguistics that are concerned with that. There are semantics and pragmatics. And semantics is about sort of linguistic meaning as it's associated with linguistic forms, where pragmatics is more about the usage of linguistic meaning in context. So you really need the two together to have a complete account of meaning. So I do semantics and pragmatics. But those are the two sides of it as some people understand it. I got the chance to see, "Oh, there's a lot of work that could be done applying semantics to law. And actually, when I think about it and I look at legal language, there's a lot that I can learn about how natural language seems to work by looking at the law because..." So this is sort of the beginning of my research journey into this kind of work that I actually do now. I wrote my first ever talk about the semantics of shall in the US Constitution. It was my first ever talk. I gave it at the Society for Linguistics Undergrads at UC Berkeley, at their symposium.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Period. Period.
Tilly Brooks:
And yeah, it just kind of snowballed from there. So now I'm in law school.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Just [inaudible 00:21:36] mentioned.
Ashley Yeh:
Okay. Just casually, you're in law school.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
There are some missing steps in there.
Tilly Brooks:
But yeah, so I'm now a JD/PhD student. And the idea behind this was I always loved linguistics. I always knew I wanted to be a linguist, but to work in law, I mean, although I say this all the time, so Tanajia's nodding at me because I'm actually very annoying about this-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
She's a PhD/JD.
Tilly Brooks:
I'm always, always, always talking about, "Well, you know, you have to think about this procedurally too, because you can't just look at the sort of..." Understanding how the law works is so crucial to being able to do good research on the law as a linguist. So that was the big motivation for me for going to law school.
Ashley Yeh:
And you did the law. The law is at Yale.
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah, that's right.
Ashley Yeh:
And you are in the process of doing that while you're doing your PhD here. So it's concurrent, not like one after the other?
Tilly Brooks:
Exactly.
Ashley Yeh:
Very cool.
Tilly Brooks:
So I did 1L before I started my PhD, and now I'm here at Stanford for three years. This is year two. And then after the third year of my PhD, I'll go back and finish law school.
Ashley Yeh:
And so the PhD will be three years?
Tilly Brooks:
No, no. I'll come back after I finish law school.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
She's not done with us yet.
Ashley Yeh:
Oh, wow. Okay.
Tilly Brooks:
And so very back and forth.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
And also just so that random outburst doesn't seem crazy. I think most people think of their dual degree, their JD/PhD in terms of like, "I'm doing this law degree and then this other thing might be nice to add on top of it," but one thing I always hear you talk about is how the love for language came first. Linguistics is the thing for you and then law is just like the add-on. So could you talk more about that and just share tea?
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah. I mean, I think for me, I basically eat, sleep, and breathe linguistics. I love what I do. And sort of understanding the law is a really important part of doing that well. My view of linguistics and social science in general is that we should really be doing work for people, not just about them. And for someone who is working in the domain of law, a big part of what my goal is is to really carve out law and linguistics as a meaningful area of study. You may have heard of sort of law and history, law and economics, law and sociology. That's a big one.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Not to call out [inaudible 00:23:59]. A little close to home.
Tilly Brooks:
And so law and cognitive science in ways that sometimes involves neuro too, is also a thing.
Ashley Yeh:
Occasionally, somewhat. Not really, but sometimes.
Tilly Brooks:
But I mean, my hope for the long term is to really bring linguistics into the study of law and law into the study of linguistics more seriously. I read a really good manuscript recently written by a professor named Dieter Stein, he's based in Germany, all about how the sort of relationship between law and linguistics has kind of been a one way street. A lot of law and linguistics work that we see is basically something that involves applying the theories and methods of linguistics to legal questions. And that's a very, very good use of like work at this interfacial area. But there's a lot that we can learn about natural language from carefully studying legal texts because it is still natural language data and it's very meaningfully different in a number of respects from natural language data that we get elsewhere. So that's what I'm working on right now.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah, that makes sense.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Can you elaborate on those number of respects?
Ashley Yeh:
Yes.
Tilly Brooks:
Oh yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
I'm also very curious.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Not to be that guy, but I want the receipts.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah. You've mentioned the tie between linguistics and law. And I'm curious, I've heard a few things about what you've been up to. You told me about some of it. So I'm very curious what you've been up to here with your many, many various projects.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Yes. We've got a [inaudible 00:25:29] scholar in here.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah, please. Yeah.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
She's an [inaudible 00:25:29].
Tilly Brooks:
I like to keep a lot of irons in the fire. So I guess the way that I see it, there are kind of three buckets that I would divide my projects into. One is the kind of traditional applied linguistics and law work, where I do linguistics for the purpose of understanding what's going on in law. A lot of that work these days involves essentially looking carefully at the empirical claims that people in law make about natural language.
Ashley Yeh:
So as a non-law, non-linguist, could you give me an example of how this would work?
Tanajia Moye-Green:
[inaudible 00:26:05] baby. Yes.
Ashley Yeh:
Like I'm a baby.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
A smart baby.
Ashley Yeh:
No, a dumb baby, actually.
Tilly Brooks:
Have you heard of textualism before?
Ashley Yeh:
No.
Tilly Brooks:
Okay. So-
Ashley Yeh:
Dumb baby.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Dumb, dumb baby.
Tilly Brooks:
One thing that's very consequential in law is how we go about interpreting the statutes. So statutes are laws. We can cut that part.
Ashley Yeh:
Yes. No, no. I don't know what a statute is. Now I know it's a law.
Tilly Brooks:
So statutes are laws and there are a lot of things that are still left open after they get approved by Congress because-
Ashley Yeh:
After a law gets approved by Congress.
Tilly Brooks:
Yes, after a law gets passed by Congress, signed by the president.
Ashley Yeh:
I understand.
Tilly Brooks:
Once a bill is passed and it becomes the law, I mean, it's written in natural language and natural language involves ambiguity, it involves vagueness. All kinds of unclarities.
Ashley Yeh:
Oh, that's true. That's why things get overturned.
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah, so a big part of the process of constructing what this thing that we call the law is actually happens after the legislative process has been completed because there are a lot of decisions that judges have to make to get the law from this sort of high level set of instructions to an actual decision in a specific case. And that process where we go from the text of the law to a concrete decision to be applied to a specific factual pattern is statutory interpretation.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Ah. Oh my gosh. You're connecting dots for me right now.
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
Okay. I understand.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Wow. Yes.
Tilly Brooks:
And this is really important because a lot happens in that process and there's a lot that could vary.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Yes.
Tilly Brooks:
So among judges, judges are one of the groups of people in law who do a lot of statutory interpretation. Agencies also do a lot, for example. Among judges, there are a couple of different approaches, competing approaches to how the law should be interpreted. Some people believe that we should really be trying to uncover congressional intent and then making a decision that whatever decision cleaves most closely to the understood intent. Other people believe we should look at the sort of purpose of the statute and make a decision that is sort of guided by our understanding of the purpose. And there are other people who believe we should look at statutory text to the exclusion of other sources, at least sort of with the text having like some sort of like particularly marked primacy, and that should guide what we interpret the law to be. And those are textualists. There's a lot of disagreement about what exactly textualism is.
Ashley Yeh:
I see.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
She broke it down for us.
Tilly Brooks:
And we definitely see like a couple different kinds of textualists on the Supreme Court most prominently at the moment. But the sort of through line is really this prioritization of text. In my opinion, prioritization of text to the like, in most extreme cases, complete exclusion of sources like legislative history most famously, and to the partial exclusion of these sources in more moderate cases. So textualism has become the sort of predominant approach to statutory interpretation on the Supreme Court and in many places throughout the federal judiciary. And that involves making a lot of claims about how natural language works. There's this thing, it's called ordinary meaning. At a high level, you might understand it as sort of the meaning that would be assigned to like a word or phrase as it appears in a statute by just ordinary people or like a reasonable person, but an ordinary one nonetheless.
Ashley Yeh:
Like someone without like a law background?
Tilly Brooks:
This is actually another point of contention because there are some people who think this should be a sort of like ordinary lawyers meaning and other people, this means, yeah, we should be looking at sort of common usage in mainstream American English at the time the statute was passed. So the exact boundaries of what should go into consideration for ordinary meaning is definitely contested. I'm actually writing a paper about this right now because I think from the perspective of a linguist, the thing that's ordinary is variation and extreme context sensitivity in many cases, which is very difficult to square with certain approaches to ordinary meaning that we see in practice.
But a lot of my work is all about how do we go about identifying ordinary meaning. I might look at a claim about the ordinary meaning of a word or phrase and then say, "Well, the judge said this, they used these kinds of evidence. Here's what I think as a linguist." Because at that point, we're just looking at how we might most appropriately describe usage. And that's a linguist's job.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
And this is all in that first bucket.
Tilly Brooks:
This is that first bucket of sort of what is the meaning that we find for the things that go into law? So that's one bucket. I call that sort of the language of law bucket, better understanding the meaning in law. And I guess it's become this sort of exchange of things because the view among many people who do statutory interpretation is the meaning that we have in law is the same as the meaning we have elsewhere. And I think there's a reason to think this is true. The parts of your brain that are engaged when you use natural language don't suddenly shut off when you walk into a courtroom. Or they don't shut off when a legislator goes into Congress.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Speak for yourself.
Tilly Brooks:
Your vocal tract is your vocal tract everywhere.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Facts, fact.
Tilly Brooks:
For example. Your ability to use syntax is your ability to use syntax everywhere. So there are certain reasons to expect things to be kind of similar. But also very obviously, and quite famously, legal language is different than language everywhere else. It's so famous we have a word for it, legalese. So that actually kind of brings me towards the next bucket of work, which is sort of... There's a lot of really good work on this-
Ashley Yeh:
Wait, I have one question. So when you say legal interpretation and like how the... You're basically saying, correct me if I'm wrong, the written language of the law as whoever wrote it intended can be interpreted very differently by people today or who have a different opinion on the law, I guess. I guess, do you have an example of where that has become very relevant?
Tilly Brooks:
Oh yeah, there are a lot.
Ashley Yeh:
There's a lot of examples, yeah.
Tilly Brooks:
And so I guess even setting aside the diachronic question, so that's sort of the question about how things have changed over time, and that's certainly relevant. We get a lot of these questions now. I'll give you some fun examples. There's one question about whether a fish counts as a tangible object, for example, whether a translator who produces written translations counts as an interpreter would be another example. We were just talking about this over a dinner, this is an old case, but whether a tomato is legally a fruit or a vegetable.
Ashley Yeh:
Oh, yes. Very relevant.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Uh-oh. Don't start that beef again.
Tilly Brooks:
The Supreme Court actually decided this one unanimously and then later-
Ashley Yeh:
Culinarily it is a vegetable.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Should fruit be cooked?
Tilly Brooks:
... the answer is that legally it's a vegetable, by the way. But it's similar, there's another case about whether seeds are nuts. So a lot of these questions come down to kind of interesting questions about lexical semantics. And then we also get questions about what does "because of" mean? Does "because of" mean sort of proximate causation? This one might be a little too technical actually.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Now my brain started... Just kidding. It's the lights.
Tilly Brooks:
So I guess I'll give an example of more from my own research. Another example is if we look at the sort of linguistic cues that signal legal obligation. I do a lot of work on the word "shall", which tends to be understood as a cue of strong legal obligation. But it's pretty rare in modern English. It's the least common of the central modal. So this is words like, will would, shall, should, can, could, may, might, and must.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Right off the dome.
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
I do not use shall very often, indeed-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
"I shall use this restroom." Use it all the time.
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah, in fact, for most people, among those nine words that I just named, shall is the least common. And in legal context-
Ashley Yeh:
You're different. You're so unique.
Tilly Brooks:
More precisely in statutory context, it's by far the most common model. So there are meaningful differences between language in the law and language elsewhere, some of which result from the things that the law needs to do. We don't write rules for each other. That's not most of what we do when we speak. But it's a lot of what statutes do, for example. But they're even beyond that. I mean, must conveys often the same meaning in mainstream American English that shall does in the law. We use must to describe and create obligations for people, but that's not how we see must used, it's usually shall that fulfills that role. So there are things that still have to be explained beyond just the sort of functional pressures involved.
Ashley Yeh:
I'm so curious now, I'm even more curious now about your projects that you've been doing here with... I know there's a KHeystone Project that you guys are working on. I was wondering if you could tell us.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
We'll never know about the two buckets.
Tilly Brooks:
Oh yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
Oh yes. Oh yes. I'm sorry. Yes. The other bucket.
Tilly Brooks:
That's actually a great segue into the second bucket. So bucket number one is sort of the language of law. What's going on with language as we see it in law and how can we use linguistics to better understand it? And separately, how can we use our understanding of law to better understand natural language phenomena? Language of law.
The next bucket is law of language. And these are questions related to sort of how different linguistic communities are treated based on the sort of important political and legal decisions that actors make in our system. And through this lens, I'm really concerned with how this shows up in civil rights and criminal justice contexts. So Tanajia and I have actually been working on a project related to the California Racial Justice Act. This is Cal Penal Code Section 745.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Straight off the dome.
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah. And section 745(a)(2) importantly includes actually a sort of prohibition on the usage of racially discriminatory language in court at trial by most relevant courtroom actors. But there's some real questions in practice and certainly for me, reading the statute, 745(h)(4) actually defines racially discriminatory language. So you can look there for more detail if you're curious. But there's been a lot of questions in practice about what it means for language to be racially discriminatory. And from our perspective, we're really trying to chase down sort of what is the effect on criminal justice outcomes of using racially charged language in the courtroom. When a jury hears a prosecutor repeatedly compare a defendant to an animal, for example, how does that affect the sort of factual decisions they need to make? People's ability to have their fair day in court, is that sort of negatively impacted by these kinds of linguistic decisions?
Now, the research in linguistics and a couple other social science fields indicates that the answer to this is yes, people are negatively impacted by this sort of thing. But we haven't had so many sort of legislative attempts to attend to the findings in the research until pretty recently. So the RJA was passed in 2020, amended in 2022, and we're really excited to be working on this together to start to sort of see what we can do to push our RJA litigation forward.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Yeah, it's actually super awesome. Very grateful that Tilly brought me on board. Especially because I think something that's important to me is not only to be doing research that's like research inside the classroom and all of that stuff, yada, yada, but to actually get out there and do something that I feel can produce some sort of faster, tangible results, if that makes sense? And I can definitely see with what me and Tilly have been discussing recently how that's going to fulfill that for me. As well as just like I'm just motivated by this just because, I don't know, as you probably noticed, Tilly's very passionate about her work. She could convince me to do anything and I would do it in a heartbeat. So super grateful to be working with.
Tilly Brooks:
It's been amazing working together. I think because we share a sort of passion for really bringing the research into the real world, in a way that could be very challenging when your sort of locus is in academia sometimes.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Right.
Tilly Brooks:
One thing about this project that was super exciting, so the two of us were leading the project together and this was sort of Tanajia's expertise and experience was really, really essential to this because I was kind of like, "Okay, Tanajia, what do we do next? How do we do an interview [inaudible 00:38:23]?"
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Not you doing this. No way, no way.
Tilly Brooks:
But the other two authors, we did a conference presentation of our sort of preliminary findings at the Linguistics for Justice Conference-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Tilly held it down for us.
Ashley Yeh:
So what were your findings?
Tilly Brooks:
Oh yeah. So I guess our big sort of finding is that there is a lot of uncertainty about what racially discriminatory language means. Even when the question is raised, is this racially discriminatory? There are actually a lot of questions still on the table that are probably going to need to be worked out with further litigation. So I was surprised to see so much back and forth on it, frankly, because the statutory definition is quite clear. But it's a pretty new concept. It's not something I've ever seen in a statute before, and not in this sort of criminal justice context specifically certainly either. And so in this respect, the RJA is actually quite innovative.
So one of our big findings is actually there are not so many cases on this topic yet. There's not a lot of law that has made it so far that we have sort of precedential. These are opinions that have the sort of effect of creating rules that will need to be followed or sort of expected to be followed in legal practice subsequently. So there's not a lot of precedential law, or there are not a lot of precedential judicial opinions on language related claims arising under the RJA. And so-
Ashley Yeh:
What is RJ?
Tilly Brooks:
Oh, RJA is the Racial Justice Act. That's the abbreviation for the popular name. That was our big thing. But I guess what was super exciting, we also had two summer interns working on this project.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Woo-hoo.
Tilly Brooks:
They were our co-authors, Cameron and Kendall, and they did such a good job there.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
They're amazing.
Tilly Brooks:
They were amazing. And so one thing that's really important also throughout this work is getting to be involved with teaching and mentoring. Like I said before, I love what I do. And one thing is that I love getting to share my ideas and teaching people about linguistics and law and linguistics as it exists right now is a very fast growing area. There aren't a lot of people in it at the moment. So I have this amazing opportunity to be part of this effort to really carve out law and linguistics as a cohesive field in the US. And a big part of that for me is mentoring students, showing up for people, teaching where I can. So we also had Cameron and Kendall on this project, I want to make sure I give them a shout out.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
You've done a fabulous job so far.
Tilly Brooks:
But yeah, we presented this work at the Linguistics for Justice Conference in July, and now we have a KHeystone Project about it.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Yee-haw. And I just also wanted to get you to tell us about that final bucket.
Tilly Brooks:
Oh yeah.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
It's the third bucket.
Ashley Yeh:
There's more?
Tanajia Moye-Green:
There's more. I'm so sorry, I forgot you're a productive scholar, period.
Tilly Brooks:
So we have bucket one, which is the language of law. And this is mostly in the domain of legal interpretation. We have the second bucket, which is the law of language. And this is mostly in the area of language rights, linguistic justice in civil rights and criminal justice context. The third bucket doesn't have a fun name, but it's all sort of research about the experiences that linguists have and their role as advocates within the legal system.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
This is cool.
Tilly Brooks:
So I did a project about amicus briefs filed by linguists with the Supreme Court.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Ah, yes.
Ashley Yeh:
What is that?
Tanajia Moye-Green:
I don't know what that is either.
Tilly Brooks:
I always forget to describe what amicus briefs are. So amicus briefing is a form of briefing filed by sort of parties that are not in interest in a case. That is, they're not on either side of the V. I mean, they might have an interest in the case, but they're not one of the sort of parties who actually is like one of the people who's actually litigating the case. But they can make a filing, usually at the appellate level, trying to influence the decision that the court is going to make. So you'll see often it'll sort of be, "Brief of amicus curiae..." Which means, that's Latin, means friends of the court, "In favor of..." They might say the name of the party they're supporting or they might say, "In favor of plaintiffs," sometimes they say, "In support of neither party."
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Sorry, that's funny.
Tilly Brooks:
Sometimes people do that to-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
I love that.
Tilly Brooks:
But linguists file amicus briefs often in cases related to disputes over interpretation. So I did some work on that and there I found there's pretty limited engagement. In most cases with the filings that linguists make as amici is with the Supreme Court. But there are some notable exceptions, particularly we see a lot of engagement when cases are about firearms. So very recently, the ghost guns case, this is Bondi v. Vanderstok-
Ashley Yeh:
What is the ghost guns case?
Tilly Brooks:
That's a great question. So gun parts kits are what they sound like. So they are little kits that involve the components of a gun, which can be assembled pretty quickly into guns. But they're not always neatly understood as firearms themselves, which makes them harder to trace. So we've seen a lot of cases where actually the firearm used in mass shooting events were actually ghost guns, which are guns assembled from gun parts kits.
Ashley Yeh:
I see.
Tilly Brooks:
There is a statute that essentially give the attorney general the power to regulate firearms in certain respects, Which Is then delegated to the ATF, the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Okay. Now the question in Bondi versus Vanderstok, this was not a Second Amendment case. The question was whether gun parts kits should be understood as firearms for purposes of this statute. And the consequence of that would be that the ATF would then have the ability to regulate gun parts kits to the same extent that they can regulate other kinds of firearms. I'll just say a team of linguists and legal scholars working at Stanford and Georgetown had a brief all about the sort of linguistic semantics of firearm and they've sort of found, you know, it's an artifact noun, which is the name for the class of nouns that describe objects that are created by humans through... They're created by humans, essentially. Typically through some sort of intentional effort. This filing was actually cited pretty extensively in the majority opinion, which did find that gun parts kits can be understood as firearms for purposes of this statute.
So there's an interesting exception in the case of firearms related cases, though generally speaking, linguistics amicus briefs are not really substantively engaged with by Supreme Court, nor really are many amicus briefs filed by people who are not the government. Generally speaking. I mean, amicus briefing has increased pretty dramatically in recent decades. So there is just a feasibility aspect to it, honestly, where the court has a lot of papers to read from the actual parties. And then in certain cases, for instance, Bostock v. Clayton County, so 2020 employment case, employment discrimination case, where the Supreme Court held that discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation is a sex discrimination within the meaning of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 of Title VII. But there were over 120 amicus briefs in that case. So you can imagine when-
Ashley Yeh:
I see.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Okay, okay. That's a lot.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah.
Tilly Brooks:
That was exceptional. That's more than typical. But the number of amicus filings can get quite high. And so yes, a lot of my research in this domain is sort of related to the challenges linguists experience as advocates in the practice of the law. What are the challenges? How can linguists be more effective? What sort of efforts have been most successful? I just gave a talk about the fact law distinction and how that may actually be posing challenges for linguists who are weighing in on interpretive issues because we approach natural language, we study natural language as sort of a scientific objective study. But the interpretation of the law, unsurprisingly, is a legal matter to be resolved by legal experts. So what is the proper place of the clearly empirical questions that textualists are asking when they are in the process of resolving this legal issue?
There are people who say, "Well, ordinary meaning's not empirical." I guess that's one approach that you could take. And there is a reason to think it. But there's certainly at some level an empirical element to it. And I'm not so sure that we've found the proper place in the practice of the law as things now stand. So part of the question is, what is the proper role of linguists in all of this? And how can people who are trained in both linguistics and law be involved with the resolution of this? So that's the third bucket.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Wow. I'm so glad I know you.
Ashley Yeh:
I'm so impressed that there are three buckets. I have my one.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Because this is amazing. No, exactly.
Ashley Yeh:
My half bucket.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Someone asked me what I'm doing and I'm like, "Um..." But in any case, thank you so much, Tilly, for that very thorough discussion of what you do, why you do it, why it matters. You inspire me every single day. And we will continue this discussion every single day, literally.
Tilly Brooks:
Yes, we will.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
But recognizing that you are a busy scholar, I'd like to learn some more fun things about you.
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah, I love fun.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
For our listeners, Tilly, can you please share with us about your experience of pursuing a dual degree? How did you know that you needed a JD/PhD and what does it mean to get the degree from two different places? Spoiler alert.
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah. Okay. I actually love answering this question because I made the decision very last minute to go to law school. I was participating in an NSF REU, which is research experiences for undergraduates. This was the summer before I started my last year of undergrad. And so I knew I wanted to apply to PhD programs in linguistics and I knew that I wanted to do linguistics and law. But there was still a question, is the law degree necessary for doing this kind of work? I think the short answer is no. There are linguists who do very good work on law without having a JD, I think. Some of my favorites are Sherise King-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
We love her.
Tilly Brooks:
... Dominique Branson, who's really amazing sociolinguist, Cleo Condoravdi, outstanding semanticist, who do very good work, influential work. And mostly they facilitate what they do through partnership. But the question was sort of, is a law degree necessary for what I want to do? And the answer that I landed on is yes. I was in the process of doing this work on the Constitution and just all the time these sort of detailed procedural questions were coming up. And the answer almost always was, "Well, I have to punt it to someone else or not address it." And so I knew just going from early on in the project that I really did want to do both and I really wanted to do sort of linguistics looking at law that is seriously grounded in an understanding of how the law works.
And at a certain point, I'm really hoping to have the opportunity to practice. I'm interested in doing plaintiff side civil rights work specifically. So there was also sort of an interest in practicing law, which of course Is a very common reason to go to law school. I might even say the most common reason. So around the end of August, I decided I was going to go to law school-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Dang.
Tilly Brooks:
And I began this mad dash. I studied for the LSAT, I took it in November. And I fired off all my applications. Way too many, by the way, I applied to 16 law schools and eight PhD programs-
Ashley Yeh:
Wow.
Tilly Brooks:
Which I wouldn't recommend doing that.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Oh my.
Tilly Brooks:
That was too many. Too many applications. But-
Ashley Yeh:
But you did that.
Tilly Brooks:
I did. I did. And so-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
She did that.
Tilly Brooks:
It all worked out. I did all of my graduate school admissions all at once. And so there were questions of sort of, "Okay, well, which one do I do first? And what order do I do them in? And what set of institutions makes the most sense?" And at the end of the day, I ended up landing on YLS, so that's Yale Law, for my legal education. I really love getting to be at YLS.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Period.
Tilly Brooks:
I found amazing mentors, people who have been supporting me.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Some awesome faculty over there.
Tilly Brooks:
Some awesome faculty. The professor who hired me as an RA, the one who's responsible for me even doing this, I got to write a longer paper with her that I will need to circle back to. I won't talk about it because it's actually kind of like procedurally complicated and it will be like a long explanation.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
That's so exciting.
Tilly Brooks:
I wrote a paper about the law related to the enforcement of Article II treaties within the domestic legal system in the United States with her that was basically turning completely on an interesting linguistic question. I get to be close to my family, which is important to me.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Nutmeggers.
Tilly Brooks:
And then I got to come here to Stanford to work with some of my favorite linguists. I'm advised by this amazing team of people who do very different things-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Can confirm.
Tilly Brooks:
... who are all very supportive, who have really, really diverse interests. I love the Stanford Linguistics community, so I'm very grateful to have found a home here.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
And you love the sociologists, right?
Tilly Brooks:
I do. I love the sociologists.
Ashley Yeh:
And the neuroscientists, right?
Tanajia Moye-Green:
I love all departments actually. All disciplines.
Tilly Brooks:
This is the amazing thing about Stanford actually is that I find myself in all kinds of things, all kinds of different places here. Yesterday, for example, I started my day at the School of Education, I'm TA-ing a class there this quarter. And then I came to the linguistics department for a talk, and then I went to an event with the East Asian Languages and Cultures, I went to another event with the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department, and then I went back to linguistics. And then at a certain point, I found myself around philosophy for a little bit. And then I had a meeting with a psychologist because I'm advised by one of them. And so-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
You're dabbling in everything.
Tilly Brooks:
You know, I get to do a little bit of everything and Stanford is a very easy place to get to do that.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
That is so special.
Ashley Yeh:
And I was also wondering, how does Knight-Hennessy figure into all this? Because we love to bring Knight-Hennessy into everything we talk about.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
[inaudible 00:53:23] I'm sorry about that.
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah, you know, I think I was honestly surprised by how important KH has been in my life here. I mean, Tanajia and I met through KH, and now we're collaborators. And so, I mean, a big part is sort of, I don't know how much I would be leaving the Linguistics Department if I weren't part of this community. I mean, I'd be going to the Law School and probably the Psych department and Philosophy because I have interest in those fields. But I really am everywhere these days.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
You are.
Ashley Yeh:
You are.
Tilly Brooks:
And I think KH has a lot to do with it. I just had a tour of the medical school, for example, I just get to do so many things, partly because of KH. And I also get lunch, which I love. Okay, maybe leave that out.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
No, I think that's important.
Ashley Yeh:
[inaudible 00:54:12] lunches.
Tilly Brooks:
I mean, but really though, I come to this very special physical space very regularly, and have gotten to meet new people and build important personal and professional connections. And I have to say that a scholarship like KH is not really the sort of thing that I ever saw myself doing. I think when I was applying to grad school, when I was submitting my 24 graduate school applications... And I have to say again, I do think that was excessive. This is what I did. I am not endorsing this-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
She's crying as she says this, y'all. Tears are streaming down her cheeks.
Tilly Brooks:
I didn't even apply to KH when I was applying to grad school because I was like, "Well, there's no way I'm going to get in anyway."
Tanajia Moye-Green:
What? Tilly, you are KH.
Tilly Brooks:
"No chance." And I was just doing so much at the same time that I just didn't even bother. And then while I was on my gap year, I decided that I was going to start with law school. So while I was in the first year of law school, I realized, "Oh, I'm still eligible to apply," and I'm now not writing any other applications for graduate school. So I thought, "Well, you know, might as well just fire off an application."
Tanajia Moye-Green:
As one does.
Tilly Brooks:
And here we are.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
And the rest was history.
Tilly Brooks:
I'm glad I took the swing.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
I'm glad you did too.
Tilly Brooks:
That's been the big learning curve for me. Tanajia's going to start laughing at me when I say this because I say this a lot. One of the things that I realized is sort of-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
On the mind this whole experience.
Tilly Brooks:
... when you make the transition from being an undergrad to a grad student, and sort of making the transition from being a student to being someone who is a student still, but also a researcher and an educator, you have to start taking yourself seriously in a very real sense.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Ah. Sorry. I love this saying. She just has told me it so many times. She's like, "Tanajia, you have to take yourself seriously." And she's right.
Tilly Brooks:
You have to take yourself seriously. I was the main reason I wasn't submitting work to conferences. It wasn't that I wasn't doing anything, it was that I was sitting on my hands because I wasn't taking myself seriously. And so it was really, I was working on getting myself to take bigger swings, apply for that fellowship, read that paper, go talk to that professor and sort of taking these bigger professional, personal academic swings has been sort of a very important part of life. So I'm working on it. Sometimes it's hard for me to be brave, but it's very important.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Tilly, what advice would you have for other people applying to Stanford and KH? What would you have wanted to know before joining KH? Tell us everything.
Tilly Brooks:
Yeah. I mean, I think the sort of thing that's been most surprising to me is how important KH has been in my experience at Stanford. KH has sort of been really beneficial to me in the ways that I expected. It's where this funding for my stipend comes from. It's where my tuition coverage comes from. It's where I eat lunch most weekdays during the quarter. But also a lot of important sort of professional and personal relationships have come out of KH. And I've learned a lot through the programming that we have. We had this sort of storytelling experience. People are surprised by this because I'm a linguist, so they think I'm supposed to have a way with words, but I'm actually very scared of public speaking. And as far as I'm concerned, being a linguist just means I have more ways to put my foot in my mouth or I can just do it in more ways in English and in other languages.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
In Latin.
Tilly Brooks:
But we got to practice public speaking within the community through the programming here.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
[inaudible 00:57:42].
Tilly Brooks:
And so I think the sort of-
Ashley Yeh:
"It could be in any language, there's so many."
Tilly Brooks:
I think those parts have sort of been really surprising to me. And so the advice that I would have to my past self is sort of lean in and lean in specifically on the things that are important to you. I mean, I guess the thing that has taken me through all of this is sort of following my nose with respect to what makes me curious. I did ancient languages because they were interesting to me. And I don't specialize in that anymore, but the abstract knowledge that comes from the process of having done that sort of comparative study of so many languages simultaneously and the sort of level of like investment and buy-in to something that didn't have an immediately obvious application has been immensely beneficial for me because it's shaped so much of how I think about a problem.
So lean in to actually the parts that are sort of authentic to who I am because, in a lot of ways, lean in first and the skills and the necessary steps that are required for what it is that you're going to do follow. Another thing I hear a lot, I think being pre-law is different than being pre-med. Because when you're pre-med, so I hear, you have to take chemistry and all these other classes, physics, I think, whatever else.
Ashley Yeh:
You do.
Tilly Brooks:
If you're pre-law, you say, "I'm pre-law." And you take the LSAT eventually and you keep your grades up. And that's it basically. Ideally, you learn how to be a good writer, but that's really all you need to do, which is how I transitioned from thinking about law school, but not very seriously, to deciding to go to law school within the space of two months. So I think this is, especially for people who are thinking about doing law and something else, follow your passions because there are many stones still unturned in this field. And if you're interested in language specifically, really consider being in law and linguistics is so exciting because there's so much to do and so much richness. There are many, many things that have not even been approached yet. And not because they're not good ideas, but because people haven't done it yet.
So I get to be involved with this project at a very early stage in its development, which is so exciting. And I get to be involved with mentoring students who are interested in doing it too, which is by far one of the most rewarding things that I get to do. So my advice is just lean into what you care about and try to run your own race as much as possible because it really is something that pays off. I don't know. If I were trying to impress people, I don't think I'd do so well because I'm not a reasonable person. Wait, don't put that in.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
It's staying in there. I mean, it's the truth. It's the truth. You have no authority here, babe. Sorry.
Tilly Brooks:
I think sort of run your own race is the upshot of that.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
Thank you for existing, Tilly.
Tilly Brooks:
Thank you for existing.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
And sharing so much with us on this podcast. Thank you for existing, Ashley.
Tilly Brooks:
Yes, thank you for existing, Ashley.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
We got to make sure we get that in.
Ashley Yeh:
You're very-
Tanajia Moye-Green:
And thank you for listening, listener.
Tilly Brooks:
Thank you to listeners at home.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
PBS Kids or something.
Ashley Yeh:
Sorry.
Tanajia Moye-Green:
And with that, it's a wrap.
Sydney Hunt:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Imagine A World, where we hear from inspiring members of the KHS community who are making significant contributions in their respective fields, challenging the status quo and pushing the boundaries of what is possible as they imagine the world they want to see.
Willie Thompson:
This podcast is sponsored by Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University, a multidisciplinary, multicultural graduate fellowship program providing scholars with financial support to pursue graduate studies at Stanford while helping equip them to be visionary, courageous, and collaborative leaders who address complex challenges facing the world. Follow us on social media @KnightHennessy, and visit our website at kh.stanford.edu to learn more about the program and our community.
