Edward Finegan researches discourse analysis, language in law, and language variation and change. Also a professor at the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Professor Finegan teaches Lawyering Skills.
 
Professor Finegan’s current research projects include investigations of the relationship between register variation and social dialect variation, of the history of attitudes toward language correctness, and of ethical practices in forensic consulting. He is the author ofLanguage: Its Structure and Use, 5th ed. (Thomson/Wadsworth, 2008) and co-author ofLooking at Languages, 4th ed. (Thomson/Wadsworth, 2008) and Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Longman, 1999).
 
Professor Finegan completed post-doctoral work at Harvard Law School, where he was a Liberal Arts Fellow concentrating on law and linguistics. He has served as an expert to many leading law firms, particularly on matters of defamation and trademark. He is editor-designate of Dictionaries: The Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America and is president-elect of the International Association of Forensic Linguists.