Between Text, Meaning and Legal Languages: Linguistic Approaches to Legal Interpretation

This collection on legal interpretation in a broad sense presents state-of-the-art linguistic approaches that are applied for studying interpretation and meaning generation in various legal settings. It covers different aspects of the concepts like judicial dissent, court argumentation, investigating sociological meaning, or comparing legal meaning in comparative law. Scholars can turn to the volume for methods and findings to ground their own inquiries, and students will find guides to topics and methods in the field of law, meaning generation, and language. Contents Introduction Section 1: Investigating legal interpretation and argumentation The Dulac affair and the triple game of contemporary art Argumentation, rhetoric and legal justification. The case of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruling on abortion The pragmatics of evidence discourse: Ostensive acts Section 2: Looking at language to investigate legal challenges Illusions of a common Language: Impressions of an arbitration practitioner Pragmatic features of Italian court proceedings Politeness Matters: What honorifics can tell us about accuracy in Japanese-English court interpreting Textual representation as a conceptual tool: Big data analysis of legal language Section 3: Theories of sense and meaning for legal investigations What is practical about law? Contemporary legal philosophy on legal practice Natural semantic (legal?) metalanguage. What can legal theory learn from Anna Wierzbicka? Index