International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

The law operates primarily through language. Legislative bodies enact statutes and ordinances, judges hand down decisions, juries issue verdicts, and people enter into a wide variety of contractual relationships; in each case, a legal effect is produced through language. Nevertheless, until recently, the study of legal discourse was not well developed. Since the 1980s, however, an increasing number of scholars have addressed aspects of the relationship between law and language. The language of the law, with its specialized vocabulary and technical subject matter, is largely inaccessible to the lay public. Accordingly, a major focus of legal education is the socialization into the discourse practices of the legal profession. American law school pedagogy is based on the Socratic method. The students read and “brief” decisions of appellate courts in order to prepare for a daunting classroom exercise in which an arbitrarily selected student is presented with a series of questions which aggressively challenge the reasoning of each prior response, thus training the student to recognize, isolate, and respond to the legal issues that are presented – that is, to “think like a lawyer.” Much of the study of legal language has focused on courtroom discourse and, particularly, on criminal and civil trials. A trial is structured by speech events – voir dire (jury selection), opening statements, ... log in or subscribe to read full text