Metaphor In Legal Discourse

This book explores different aspects of metaphoricity in legal discourse, from court proceedings and written institutionalised texts to judges’ argumentation and in spoken records, among others. It brings together linguists and law professionals from six different countries to investigate metaphor as a conceptual phenomenon accessible through language and, more specifically, through actual linguistic contexts of use.

This book explores different aspects of metaphoricity in legal discourse, from court proceedings and written institutionalised texts to judges' argumentation and in spoken records, among others. It brings together linguists and law professionals from six different countries to investigate metaphor as a conceptual phenomenon accessible through language and, more specifically, through actual linguistic contexts of use.

Scholars from many disciplines discuss the crucial roles played by narrative and metaphor in the theory and practice of law.

Law’s Metaphors: Interrogating Languages of Law, Justice and Legitimacy presents a series of essays that reveal how metaphors for terms relating to the theory and practice of law are utilized in legal texts, literary works, and in our popular imagination. Represents an innovative approach to interdisciplinary legal scholarship Features new developments in theorizing law’s relations with language, society, and culture Includes contributions from European and North American scholars across several relevant disciplines Reveals the prevalence and power of the use of metaphors in the legal profession and in the popular imagination

This book brings together contributions from leading figures in legal studies on analogy and related forms of reasoning in the law. Analogical reasoning-which relies on the concept of two different things being in some way like each other-is hugely important not just in the practice of law, but it is nonetheless strongly contested. This volume raises key questions like: What is the logical, argumentative, rhetorical, or just heuristic force of analogy in law? Is analogy really different from extensive interpretation, reasoning by precedent and appeal to paradigm?

3 of law as an object that has always already been there, systematic and com plete. Quite the contrary. Some, indeed practically all of us, reject this sort of epistemology of law, and where the hypothesis of the coherence of the legal universe is put forward, this is in order to define it in very noticeably different terms from those traditionally used in legal scholarly accounts. If this referent, the law presented as a full discourses, runs through all of the contributions, this is because reasoning by analogy has to be found its specific place within this legal culture. It is the place to locate the problem of "lacunae" in law, which at bottom allows our various contributions to be classified. With Zaccaria and Maris, the question of lacunae is accepted as such (this is, we might say, the "traditionalist" aspect of these two articles, which is counterbalanced by - keeping to the same terminology - "modernist" emphases, sometimes Dworkinian in nature), and becomes the backdrop for considerations of purely hermeneutic type, in Zaccaria, ex tended in Maris to the field of ethics. The papers from Lenoble and Jackson, the former philosophical and the latter semiological, take as their main tar get this legal knowledge where the theory of lacunae finds its place.

This book approaches metaphor in specialised discourses, covering various fields. The studies presented in the book adopt different research frameworks, ranging from pragmatics to conceptual metaphor theory, among others. The book is divided into three Sections that analyse major specialised discourses where metaphor is frequently found and the role that metaphor plays in these discourses. The first Section approaches the discourse of Business and Economics from different perspectives. The second Section addresses the use of metaphor in politics, diplomacy and law. Finally, Section three covers the use of metaphors in other specialised discourses such as marine, fashion, gender or health.