The take-home message of Conley and O'Barr's volume is quite the opposite of one interpretation of the title. Far from being "'just words." legal discourse is speech that matters; it has consequences for the professionals and laypeople who produce it. The authors analyze selected scholarship on law and language that has addressed this point over the past two decades. Their own considerable body of work, which includes courtroom ethnography, participant-observation of mediations, experimental studies, and detailed linguistic analyses of material from legal contexts in several regions of the country, is the base for their central claims that address the power of legal discourse, including its complex relation to social inequality. To demonstrate these claims, they also direct ample attention to other scholarship on law and language, in several cases reproducing arguments more cogently than the original authors. By examining such aspects of linguistic usage as the peculiar conversational organization of cross-examination, the contradictions between grammatical structures and legal categories, and the restrictive narrative form demanded by legal logic, among others, they illuminate the power-laden and potentially exploitative quality of legal processes. At the same time, their theory of discourse highlights the agency of ordinary people as they struggle to tell their stories despite the constraints of legal discourse.