Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Dr. Janet Cotterill was a linguist dedicated to forensic linguistics (or language and law) primarily. Through her work, she also contributed more generally to systemic functional linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and language and gender. Cotterill published on the intersection between language and legal procedures, focusing on courtroom discourse, police language and the communication of rights, the language of sexual violence in the legal system, and semiotics of media portrayals of female figures related to the criminal justice system. Her work provided a deeper understanding of the linguistic features of courtroom discourse, such as the interactional dynamics of the lawyer‐witness‐jury triad, lawyers' use of questioning strategies and persuasive narratives, and the establishment of institutionalized power asymmetry through language use, in turn highlighted by the discursive complexities lay people may encounter when encountering the criminal justice system.</jats:p>