Language and Legal Judgments

Language and Legal Judgments
Author: Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2024-02-06
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1003847803

Integrating research methods from Linguistics with contemporary Legal Argumentation Theory, this book highlights the complexities of legal justification by focusing on the role of value-laden language in argument construction and use. The combination of linguistic analysis and the pragma-dialectic approach to legal argumentation yields a new way of perceiving and understanding the phenomenon of evaluation, one that offers theoretical and practical gains. Analyzing a vast corpus of judicial opinions from the United States Supreme Court and Poland’s Constitutional Court, the book paints a clear picture of complex linguistic choices made by judges to assess and support arguments in the justifications of their decisions. The book will be of interest to scholars in Law, Linguistics and Rhetoric, as well as to judges and practicing lawyers engaged in the art of argumentation.

Law, Language and the Courtroom

Law, Language and the Courtroom
Author: Stanislaw Gozdz Roszkowski
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2021-11-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 100048386X

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.

Just Words

Just Words
Author: John M. Conley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2019-05-10
Genre: Law
ISBN: 022648453X

Is it “just words” when a lawyer cross-examines a rape victim in the hopes of getting her to admit an interest in her attacker? Is it “just words” when the Supreme Court hands down a decision or when business people draw up a contract? In tackling the question of how an abstract entity exerts concrete power, Just Words focuses on what has become the central issue in law and language research: what language reveals about the nature of legal power. John M. Conley, William M. O'Barr, and Robin Conley Riner show how the microdynamics of the legal process and the largest questions of justice can be fruitfully explored through the field of linguistics. Each chapter covers a language-based approach to a different area of the law, from the cross-examinations of victims and witnesses to the inequities of divorce mediation. Combining analysis of common legal events with a broad range of scholarship on language and law, Just Words seeks the reality of power in the everyday practice and application of the law. As the only study of its type, the book is the definitive treatment of the topic and will be welcomed by students and specialists alike. This third edition brings this essential text up to date with new chapters on nonverbal, or “multimodal,” communication in legal settings and law, language, and race.

Elements of Moral Cognition

Elements of Moral Cognition
Author: John Mikhail
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2011-06-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0521855780

John Mikhail explores whether moral psychology is usefully modelled on aspects of Universal Grammar.

Lifting the Fog of Legalese

Lifting the Fog of Legalese
Author: Joseph Kimble
Publisher:
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2006
Genre: Law
ISBN:

"Professor Joseph Kimble, a leading expert on plain language, has collected in this one book many of his published essays. They will interest and inform judges, lawyers, law students, legal scholars, and anyone else who engages in legal writing."--BOOK JACKET.

Researching Language and the Law

Researching Language and the Law
Author: Davide S. Giannoni
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9783034304436

This volume reflects the latest work of scholars specialising in the linguistic and legal aspects of normative texts across languages (English, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish) and law systems. Like other domains of specialised language use, legal discourse is subject to the converging pressures of internationalisation and of emerging practices that destabilise well-established norms and routines. In an integrated, interdependent context, supranational laws, rules and procedures are gradually developed and harmonised to regulate issues that can no longer be dealt with by national laws alone, as in the case of the European Union. The contributors discuss the impact of such developments on the construction, evolution and hybridisation of legal texts, analysed both linguistically and from the practitioner's standpoint.

Common Sense and Legal Judgment

Common Sense and Legal Judgment
Author: Patricia Cochran
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages:
Release: 2017-11-27
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0773552324

What does it mean when a judge in a court of law uses the phrase “common sense”? Is it a type of evidence or a mode of reasoning? In a world characterized by material and political inequalities, whose common sense should inform the law? Common Sense and Legal Judgment explores this rhetorically powerful phrase, arguing that common sense, when invoked in political and legal discourses without adequate reflection, poses a threat to the quality and legitimacy of legal judgment. Often operating in the service of conservatism, populism, or majoritarianism, common sense can harbour stereotypes, reproduce unjust power relations, and silence marginalized people. Nevertheless, drawing the works of theorists such as Thomas Reid, Antonio Gramsci, and Hannah Arendt into conversation with rulings by the Supreme Court of Canada, Patricia Cochran demonstrates that with careful attention, the democratic, egalitarian, and community-sustaining aspects of common sense can be brought to light. A call for critical self-reflection and the close scrutiny of power relationships and social contexts, this book is a direct response to social justice predicaments and their confounding relationships to law. Creative and interdisciplinary, Common Sense and Legal Judgment reinvigorates feminist and anti-poverty understandings of judgment, knowledge, justice, and accountability.

Language in the Negotiation of Justice

Language in the Negotiation of Justice
Author: Girolamo Tessuto
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 467
Release: 2016-04-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1317107977

This book explores the ways language is used by the professional legal community for the communication of its main business - the negotiation of justice - in today’s globalized world. The volume addresses three main aspects of language use in the negotiation of justice. Beginning with the legal contexts of litigation, arbitration and mediation, the book moves on to discuss the main issues identified in those contexts and finally it explores the applications of legal linguistics. These three aspects are studied across the themes of analyses of legal discourse and genres, issues of power and ideology in the use of legal language, cross-cultural legal communication, questions of recontextualization, accessibility and plain language, law and disciplinary identity, and pedagogy of legal language. With chapters set across a variety of jurisdictions, the contributions offer analytical insights into the interface between law and language. The book is a valuable resource for those in the legal community wishing to increase their understanding of the use of language for the negotiation of justice.

Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy

Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy
Author: Brian Christopher Jones
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2020-06-26
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1788971108

Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy investigates the increasingly important subject of constitutional idolatry and its effects on democracy. Focussed around whether the UK should draft a single written constitution, it suggests that constitutions have been drastically and persistently over-sold throughout the years, and that their wider importance and effects are not nearly as significant as constitutional advocates maintain. Chapters analyse whether written constitutions can educate the citizenry, invigorate voter turnout, or deliver ‘We the People’ sovereignty.

Indigenous Legal Judgments

Indigenous Legal Judgments
Author: Nicole Watson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2021-06-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000401243

This book is a collection of key legal decisions affecting Indigenous Australians, which have been re-imagined so as to be inclusive of Indigenous people’s stories, historical experience, perspectives and worldviews. In this groundbreaking work, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars have collaborated to rewrite 16 key decisions. Spanning from 1889 to 2017, the judgments reflect the trajectory of Indigenous people’s engagements with Australian law. The collection includes decisions that laid the foundation for the wrongful application of terra nullius and the long disavowal of native title. Contributors have also challenged narrow judicial interpretations of native title, which have denied recognition to Indigenous people who suffered the prolonged impacts of dispossession. Exciting new voices have reclaimed Australian law to deliver justice to the Stolen Generations and to families who have experienced institutional and police racism. Contributors have shown how judicial officers can use their power to challenge systemic racism and tell the stories of Indigenous people who have been dehumanised by the criminal justice system. The new judgments are characterised by intersectional perspectives which draw on postcolonial, critical race and whiteness theories. Several scholars have chosen to operate within the parameters of legal doctrine. Some have imagined new truth-telling forums, highlighting the strength and creative resistance of Indigenous people to oppression and exclusion. Others have rejected the possibility that the legal system, which has been integral to settler-colonialism, can ever deliver meaningful justice to Indigenous people.