Abstract
The proposed research concerns the interrelations between spoken communication and written documents in two phases of the criminal law process: the police interrogation and the trial. The programme consists of three projects. The first project concerns PhD research into the interactional construction of police records. The second (post-doc) project deals with the judges' strategic use of the police records in the courtroom, in interaction with the suspects. The third (post-doc) project concerns the ways in which public prosecutors and defence lawyers use the written documents to persuade the court and to undermine their opponents' arguments.