This book investigates how language choice and code-switching practices within New York City courtrooms influence the quality of legal interpretation and the administration of justice. Philipp Sebastian Angermeyer, a linguistic anthropologist, utilizes extensive ethnographic fieldwork and audio recordings from actual court proceedings to analyze the complex interactions between non-English speaking defendants, attorneys, and court interpreters. The work argues that the rigid, monolingual expectations of the legal system often clash with the fluid, multilingual reality of the city's diverse population, creating significant barriers to effective communication.

Scholars in sociolinguistics and legal studies identify this work as a significant contribution to the understanding of language policy in institutional settings. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose and the precision of the linguistic analysis provided throughout the text.