Researching Language and the Law

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.

The Editors: Davide S. Giannoni, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Bergamo, in Northern Italy, whose Centre for LSP Research (CERLIS) he helped establish in 1999. His research on academic and professional genres has appeared in several international journals and volumes and he is completing a monograph entitled Mapping Academic Values in the Disciplines: A Corpus-Based Approach for Peter Lang. He has also co-edited Identity Traits in English Academic Discourse (2008) and New Trends in Specialized Discourse Analysis (2006).
Celina Frade, Ph.D., is Professor of English for Specific Purposes at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has conducted extensive research on legal English and more recently on the discourse of international arbitration and its implications for Brazilian legal practice. She is currently writing an introduction to legal English and a book on reading/drafting strategies in international contracts. Her work has been published in several volumes, including the Linguistic Insights series.