This book provides a range of highly accessible approaches from Discourse Studies for analyzing legal language in legislation, documents, proceedings and in news media reporting.
In this insightful volume, scholars from both Law and Linguistics come together to provide a range of approaches from Discourse Studies for analyzing legal language in legislation, documents and proceedings and in news media reporting. The book begins with tackling exactly why such approaches are hugely helpful and valuable for understanding the nature of legal language and how it is used. The chapters, written in an accessible manner, show how discourse analysis can be used to throw light on the ideas and values which can be buried in legal language. The book provides a valuable resource for researchers wishing to carry out their own research or for use in teaching.
The Law and Critical Discourse Studies will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of law, language and linguistics, discourse studies, sociology, and media and cultural studies.This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Discourse Studies.
Introduction: The Law and Critical Discourse Studies
Le Cheng and David Machin
- Protecting "Competition, not Competitors": Antitrust dscourse and the AT&T-Time Warner merger
Pawel Popiel - Applying the principles of Vivir Bien to a court resolution in Bolivia: language, discourse, and land law
María Itatí Dolhare and Sol Rojas-Lizana - Race, religion, law: An intertextual micro-genealogy of ‘stirring up hatred’ provisions in England and Wales
Jen Neller - The Magna Carta of women as the Philippine translation of the CEDAW: A feminist critical discourse analysis
Gay Marie Manalo Francisco - The depoliticization of law in the news: BBC reporting on US use of extraterritorial or ‘long-arm’ law against China
Le Cheng, Xiaobin Zhu and David Machin - Is this discursive Yentling? A critical study of an RCMP officer’s interaction with a child sexual assault complainant
Christopher A. Smith - ‘If she asked for settlement money, she must not be a real victim’: An interdisciplinary analysis of the discourse of victims and perpetrators of sexual violence
Huijae Yu
Biography
Le Cheng is Professor in Guanghua Law School, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. He is Executive Vice Dean of the Academy of International Strategy and Law and Vice Chairman of Cybersecurity Strategy and Law Committee of China. He is Editor of International Journal of Legal Discourse and Co-editor of Social Semiotics. He has published widely in discourse studies and semiotics, in relation to law and cyber governance.
David Machin is Professor in the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, Shanghai International University, China. He works in the area of discourse studies and multimodal analysis. His publications include Doing Visual Analysis (2018); Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (2020); and How to do Critical Discourse Analysis (2023). He is co-editor of the journal Social Semiotics.
