This book provides insights into the ways in which legal professionals participate in their day-to-day activities, and critically focuses on how language is used and exploited in everyday professional discourse. It is organised into two parts dealing with topic areas of legal discourse (written and spoken) relevant to professional practice and communication. The innovative research landscape offered by this book covers diverse and complex features of legal discourse construction where socially informed aspects of language use are negotiated by professional practices. Such features provide the wide scope for the critical study of legal language as a tool for social action, and set up a descriptive and interpretive framework for engaging with representations of legal discourses and genres where authority, power, ideology, as well as areas of hybridity, intertextuality, interdiscursivity and recontextualization are involved in legal discourse. This book brings together scholars from a wide academic spectrum around the globe with an interest in the intricacies of language and law as they play out in the real world. The book, therefore, offers both a resource and a stimulus to the wider readership.

Using a wide range of examples, this book examines the discourse of professional writing and its important role in society.

This book explores the language of judges. It is concerned with understanding how language works in judicial contexts. Using a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, it looks in detail at the ways in which judicial discourse is argued, constructed, interpreted and perceived. Focusing on four central themes - constructing judicial discourse and judicial identities, judicial argumentation and evaluative language, judicial interpretation, and clarity in judicial discourse - the book’s ultimate goal is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of current critical issues of the role of language in judicial settings. Contributors include legal linguists, lawyers, legal scholars, legal practitioners, legal translators and anthropologists, who explore patterns of linguistic organisation and use in judicial institutions and analyse language as an instrument for understanding both the judicial decision-making process and its outcome. The book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in legal linguistics and those specialising in judicial argumentation and reasoning ,and forensic linguists interested in the use of language in judicial settings.

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the research carried out over the past thirty years in the vast field of legal discourse. The focus is on how such research has been influenced and shaped by developments in corpus linguistics and register analysis, and by the emergence from the mid 1990s of historical pragmatics as a branch of pragmatics concerned with the scrutiny of historical texts in their context of writing. The five chapters in Part I (together with the introductory chapter) offer a wide spectrum of the latest approaches to the synchronic analysis of cross-genre and cross-linguistic variation in legal discourse. Part II addresses diachronic variation, illustrating how a diversity of methods, such as multi-dimensional analysis, move analysis, collocation analysis, and Darwinian models of language evolution can uncover new understandings of diachronic linguistic phenomena.

This volume provides new insights into the diverse and complex contexts of legal discourse and activity performed across a variety of socially and culturally informed digital media transformations. It addresses topical issues of legal discourse performed by Web-mediated technologies and (social) media usage in professional and institutional contexts of communication. Its analyses rely on specific perspectives, varied applications, and different methodological procedures, providing a multifaceted overview of ongoing research and knowledge in the field.

The demands of today’s society for greater specialization have brought about a profound transformation in the humanities, which are not immune to the competitive pressure to meet new challenges that are present in other sectors. Thus, lecturers and researchers in modern languages and applied linguistics departments have made great efforts to design syllabi and materials more attuned to the competences and requirements of potential working environments. At the same time, linguists have attempted to apply their expertise in wider areas, creating research institutes that focus on applying language and linguistics in different contexts and offering linguistic services to society as a whole. This book attempts to provide a global view of the multiple voices involved in interdisciplinary research and innovative proposals in teaching specialized languages while offering contributions that attempt to fill the demands of a varied scope of disciplines such as the sciences, professions, or educational settings. The chapters in this book are made up of current research on these themes: discourse analysis in academic and professional genres, specialized translation, lexicology and terminology, and ICT research and teaching of specialized languages.

This volume presents a combination of practical, empirical research data and theoretical reflection to provide a comparative view of language and discourse in the courtroom. The work explores how the various disciplines of law and linguistics can help us understand the nature of "Power and Control" - both oral and written - and how it might be clarified to unravel linguistic representation of legal reality. It presents and examines the most recent research and theories at national and international levels. The book represents a valuable contribution to the study and analysis of courtroom discourse and courtroom cultures more generally. It will be of interest to students and researchers working in the areas of language and law, legal theory, interpretation, and semiotics of law.

This book introduces international students to the characteristics of legal education in the United States and helps them develop the linguistic, analytical, and cultural skills to thrive at a U.S. law school. Part I focuses on the academic legal writing skills needed to write in law school. It guides students in reviewing their own writing skills and helps them to adapt to the conventions of academic legal writing at the whole text, paragraph, and sentence levels. It also gives students guidance in effectively presenting their ideas in writing so that a reader can quickly grasp their reasoning and meaning. Part II introduces students to common law and legal analysis. Following a brief introduction to the U.S. legal system, the book focuses on the skills required to read, discuss, and write about legal cases in a U.S. law class. Cases in torts and criminal procedure law provide an opportunity to apply these skills while also teaching high-frequency legal vocabulary. Throughout the book, students can read clear and concise explanations and practice the skills they are acquiring with detailed practice exercises. Professors and students will benefit from: Clear explanations of academic legal writing expected of law students on written assignments, such as exams and papers Straightforward definitions and explanations about how the common law system in the U.S. works Guidelines and practice in reading, discussing, and writing about legal cases Authentic tasks and exercises for all key concepts

This book provides a state-of-the-art account of past and current research in the interface between linguistics and law. It outlines the range of legal areas in which linguistics plays an increasing role and describes the tools and approaches used by linguists and lawyers in this vibrant new field. Through a combination of overview chapters, case studies, and theoretical descriptions, the volume addresses areas such as the history and structure of legal languages, its meaning and interpretation, multilingualism and language rights, courtroom discourse, forensic identification, intellectual property and linguistics, and legal translation and interpretation. Encyclopedic in scope, the handbook includes chapters written by experts from every continent who are familiar with linguistic issues that arise in diverse legal systems, including both civil and common law jurisdictions, mixed systems like that of China, and the emerging law of the European Union.

Language plays an essential role both in creating law and in governing its implementation. Providing an accessible and comprehensive introduction to this subject, Language and Law: describes the different registers and genres that make up spoken and written legal language and how they develop over time; analyses real-life examples drawn from court cases from different parts of the world, illustrating the varieties of English used in the courtroom by speakers occupying different roles; addresses the challenges presented to our notions of law and regulation by online communication; discusses the complex role of translation in bilingual and multilingual jurisdictions, including Hong Kong and Canada; and provides readings from key scholars in the discipline, including Lawrence Solan, Peter Goodrich, Marianne Constable, David Mellinkoff, and Chris Heffer. With a wide range of activities throughout, this accessible textbook is essential reading for anyone studying language and law or forensic linguistics. Sections A, B, and C of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315436258