New Rhetorics For Contemporary Legal Discourse

Are the general and the particular separated in legal rhetorics? What is the function of singular events, facts, names in legal argumentation and what is their relationship to legal normativity? This collection of 11 essays takes a diachronic approach to address these questions from the perspective of contemporary legal discourse.

Lawyers and the law have long been the object of popular criticism and satire for the obscurity and incomprehensibility of their language. Legal Discourse provides a novel historical and systematic account of the language of the legal institution together with a sustained criticism of legal exegesis and `legalese' more generally. In the first part of the work the doctrinal history of the legal discipline and its concepts of language, text and sign are examined and assessed. In the second part the contemporary disciples of linguistics, discourse analysis and communication studies are brought to bear upon the task of constructing a theory of legal discourse as a linguistics of legal power.

DIVAn interdisciplinary critique of the relationship between words and the law /div

Through an examination of the U.S. Supreme Court's written output during a recent landmark term, this book exposes many of the parallels between these two special kinds of language use.

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.

Lawyers, law students and their teachers all too frequently overlook the most comprehensive, adaptable and practical analysis of legal discourse ever devised: the classical art of rhetoric. Classical analysis of legal reasoning, methods and strategy is the foundation and source for most modern theories on the topic. Beginning with Aristotle's Rhetoric and culminating with Cicero's De Oratore and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, Greek and Roman rhetoricians created a clear, experience-based theoretical framework for analyzing legal discourse. This book is the first to systematically examine the connections between classical rhetoric and modern legal discourse. It traces the history of legal rhetoric from the classical period to the present day and shows how modern theorists have unknowingly benefited from the classical works. It also applies classical rhetorical principles to modern appellate briefs and judicial opinions to demonstrate how a greater familiarity with the classical sources can deepen our understanding of legal reasoning.

In this book the authors work on an innovative comparison between law and literature, starting from the modes in which law and literature function: they read law and literature as arts of compromising.