Dr. Celia Brown Blake | Faculty of Law

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Overview

Celia Brown-Blake ’94 teaches Contract, Trusts and Corporate Insolvency. Before joining MonaLaw in 2012, she lectured in Company Law, Business Law, and the Legal Environment of Business in the then Department of Management Studies, now The Mona School of Business and Management at The UWI.

In 2017, she was an international visiting scholar at Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University, where she developed and shared her research on the disenfranchisement of Caribbean vernacular speakers in the legal system. In 2012, as a Commonwealth Fellow at the London School of Economics, she examined and published on the nature of judicial oversight of decisions made and actions taken by financial regulators in the Commonwealth Caribbean.

Research Interests:

Language and the Law

Insolvency Law

Financial Regulation

Courses :

Law of Contract II

Law of Trusts

Advanced Corporate Insolvency Law

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Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=chsu7yEAAAAJ&hl=en

Profile

A qualified attorney-at-law with a Master of Laws and a PhD in Linguistics, she specializes in two distinct academic streams. She is an expert in forensic linguistics, the study of the confluence of language and the law, as well as insolvency, corporate law and financial regulation. Dr. Blake has spent the last 15 years developing new research on the impact of linguistic factors on the administration of justice in contexts involving speakers of Commonwealth Caribbean vernacular languages and making proposals for reform. A key focus of her research has been the role language rights play in improving the situation of Caribbean Creole vernacular speakers in the English-dominant legal system. She was instrumental in formulating a language rights policy charter which sets out model rights for speakers of Caribbean Creole languages. She has also held several public service appointments including Commissioner at the Financial Services Commission of Jamaica, director at the Bank of Jamaica, and has acted as a legal consultant in both local and international projects.

Research

In her research, Dr. Brown Blake has examined transcripts of court proceedings and concluded that speakers of Jamaican with little or no proficiency in English face disadvantages stemming from language, which are not adequately taken into account by the justice system. The upshot is that a Jamaican-dominant accused is effectively excluded from those aspects of his or her trial which are conducted in English.

Dr. Brown Blake proposes a language management system grounded in an official bilingual policy for the justice system with institutional recognition within the system of Jamaican alongside English. The proposal does not call for wholesale provision of interpreters. Instead, it suggests institutional adoption of the use of Jamaican where the parties involved are willing and capable.

She recommends that prior to court proceedings, the language issue should be raised and a determination made as to the language for the proceedings, based on the linguistic competences of an accused, witnesses, counsel and the judicial officer as well as the willingness of bilinguals to use Jamaican.

She suggests that special attention should be given to a Jamaican-dominant or Jamaican monolingual accused by providing a communication facilitator who would address communication and comprehension gaps that arise for the accused where the proceedings, or aspects thereof, are conducted in English. She also proposed that statements and depositions given by Jamaican-dominant or monolingual speakers should be recorded in Jamaican.

Dr. Blake’s publications on Creole speakers in the UK and Caribbean criminal justice systems and the right to linguistic non-discrimination is widely cited, including by researchers in the Caribbean, Australia, Canada, Columbia, Germany, Netherlands, South Africa and Sweden. Her work on insolvency law reform was cited in the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) Report on the Reform of Insolvency Law in Jamaica (2012) which informed the major overhaul of the country’s legislative regime for insolvency.

Publications

Chapters in Books:

C. Brown-Blake (forthcoming) “Giving expert evidence in connection with Caribbean English vernacular languages: Lessons from US v Kwame Richardson” In C Forrester, Intersections of Language Rights and Social Justice in the Caribbean Context (Studies in Caribbean Languages) Language Science Press.

C. Brown-Blake, “Judges as language referees for Caribbean English vernacular speakers: How do they score?” In M Ralarala, R Kaschula and G Heydon (eds) New Frontiers in Forensic Linguistics (2019, Sun Press) 149.

C. Brown-Blake, “The Legal Matrix Governing Directors and Officers Of Financial Supervisors: Understanding Their Role In Governance” in Suzanne Goldson, Commonwealth Caribbean Corporate Governance (Routledge 2015) 119-166.

C. Brown-Blake and Devonish, Hubert, “Developing technical vocabulary for Jamaican Creole” in Fodor, I. and Hagege, C. (eds) Language Reform: History and Future (Vol 6 Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag 1994) 149-161.

Articles:

C. Brown-Blake, "Supporting Justice Reform in Jamaica through Language Policy Change." (2017) 45 Caribbean Studies 183.

C. Brown-Blake, "Expanding the use of non-dominant Caribbean Languages: Can the Law Help?" (2014) 21 International Journal of Speech, Language & the Law 51.

C. Brown-Blake, “Judicial oversight of financial regulatory action in the Commonwealth Caribbean” (2012) Vol. 41 Common Law World Review 354-359.

C. Brown-Blake, “Lessons from a cross-border insolvency in the Caribbean” (2009) Vol. 19 Caribbean Law Review 118 -139.

C. Brown-Blake, "The Right to Linguistic Non-discrimination and Creole Language Situations: The Case of Jamaica." (2008) 23 Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 32.

C. Brown-Blake, Paul Chambers, “The Jamaican Creole speaker in the UK criminal justice system” (2007) Vol. 14 International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 269-294.

C. Brown-Blake, “The role of law in language education policy” (2007) Vol. 29 Caribbean Journal of Education 383-400.

C. Brown-Blake, “Literacy, language and the Peter Blake principle” (2007) Vol. 11 International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 50-72.

C. Brown-Blake, “Fair trial, language and the right to interpretation” (2006) Vol. 13 International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 391-412.

C. Brown-Blake, “Under One Roof: Integrated Regulator for Non-Deposit Taking Financial Institutions in Jamaica” (2002) Vol. 6 Caribbean Law Bulletin 1.

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