Volume 10, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Legal Discourse in Transition: Technology, Methodology, and Sociology; Guest Editors: Le Cheng and Jiamin Pei

This Special Issue collects eight papers that draw on theories and methods from law, discourse analysis, digital studies, and sociology to inquire into the legal discourse in transition, more specifically, the dynamic and evolving nature of legal discourse as it adapts to the multifaceted challenges of the modern, interconnected world. Notably, this collection captures law as a contested presence where technology, tools, and social demands collide. It draws on a wide array of discourses such as the Chinese criminal laws, AI-related laws in European Union and China, Chinese court judgments, online public opinion on social media Weibo, literary novels, etc. Three important aspects of legal discourse are touched upon: quantitative approaches to legal discourse, legal discourse in the digital age, and law as a site of social contestation. Methodologically, this collection covers both qualitative (e.g., content analysis) and quantitative approaches (e.g., corpus linguistics and topic modeling) to examine the use of linguistic and discursive patterns in different types of discourses. By conceptualizing legal discourse as an interdisciplinary field co-constructed by linguists, technologists, and lawmakers, this collection hopes to offer important theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights for further research at the intersection of law, linguistics, digital studies, and critical theory.

In the era of rapid digitalization, the imperative of promoting digital trust and digital security in the digital domain stands as a paramount in cyberspace. Legal and technological frameworks need to be adapted and strengthened to effectively combat cyber threats such as malware, phishing, and ransomware attacks to enhance digital trust and security. The significant economic and societal damages could be caused by data breaches and cyberattacks on critical information infrastructures. Such impact assessments in the digital domain have not been fully explored in the literature, specifically with a need for empirical studies to assess the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of legal measures in mitigating cyber risks and enhancing digital trust and security. Within such backdrops, this present study aims to address the impacts of digital technologies on digital trust and security, ethical challenges bewtween balancing data protection principles and legal compliance measures, and fill in the jurisdictional gaps. It is hoped to empower stakeholders to effectively navigate the complexities of the digital domain and safeguard trust and security in the digital age, and empower stakeholders to effectively navigate the complexities of the digital domain and safeguard trust and security in the digital age.

This article examines the converging regulatory landscape for artificial intelligence, particularly algorithms, in the European Union and China. It explores how these jurisdictions influence each other in their regulatory approach and suggests that various factors enable significant convergence in the legal discourse and policy in this area. In particular, the article describes how these jurisdictions have increasingly recognised algorithms as primary objects of regulation and have adopted similar language and rules. The article analyses recent legislative texts on three subjects: the principle of transparency, automated decision-making and algorithmic recommendation systems. The study also reveals notable divergences between the two that are rooted in their distinct socio-political contexts, complicating the straightforward transplant of regulatory models. The article situates the analysis within the broader literature on legal convergence and emphasises the complexities of transposing legal rules across jurisdictions. Ultimately, this study highlights the need for a nuanced understanding of convergence and divergence in the legal discourse concerning AI and algorithms, complementing the literature comparing the approaches of Chinese and EU lawmakers to the regulation of technology.

As a new type of military confrontation in the era of informationization, cyber warfare has broken through the physical boundaries of the traditional war paradigm in terms of its technical characteristics and strategic effectiveness. Due to the ambiguity of the object of regulation, the defect of attribution mechanism, and the lack of clarity of the constituent elements of responsibility, the existing international law framework has caused the state responsibility system in cyberspace to fall into the dilemma of normative failure. This paper takes the theory of international law subjectivity as the logical starting point and systematically deconstructs the normative attributes of cyberwar and the path of responsibility determination. This paper shows that the constitutive elements of state responsibility need to break through the rigid standard of traditional “behavior-damage” causality and build a dynamic attribution system combining technical verification and legal presumption. Through critical analysis of the use of force threshold doctrine, this paper, based on a comprehensive analysis of the core dilemma of the determination of state responsibility, proposes to appropriately introduce the concept of “substantial support”, and when the traditional theory of comprehensive control fails to make effective attribution, the criterion of “substantial support” can be used to complete the attribution of state responsibility with the increasingly developed technological traceability means.

With the rapid advancement of internet technology and the frequent occurrence of cyberattacks, the importance of cybersecurity continues to expand, making it essential to systematically explore the current state and development trends in this field. This study conducts a visual analysis of international cybersecurity research collected in the Web of Science SSCI Collection using CiteSpace (6.4.R1). The findings indicate a positive development trend in international cybersecurity research, characterized by increasingly significant interdisciplinary features and distinct phases. However, challenges persist in areas such as academic collaboration, journal coverage, and research perspectives. The study suggests that future cybersecurity research will be influenced by more disciplines, further enhancing interdisciplinary integration and achieving breakthroughs in technological innovation, policy formulation, and talent cultivation. The conclusions of this research provide valuable insights for the theoretical and practical advancement of cybersecurity, encouraging innovation and sustained intellectual cooperation within the discipline.

This study investigates the evolution and regulation of online public opinion on social media Weibo, focusing on the “Enterprise N Incident” in the tea beverage industry. Using social media texts as a dataset, this study utilizes topic modeling and sentiment analysis to extract key topics and analyze their corresponding sentiment trends. Specifically, it explores how sentiment dynamics shift across different stages of public discourse, revealing the underlying patterns of opinion formation and transformation. Furthermore, it examines the interplay among emerging topics, sentiment fluctuations, and regulatory mechanisms, shedding light on how public sentiment aggregation is influenced by digital governance and platform policies. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of online opinion evolution, offering implications for platform monitoring, crisis management strategies, and the development of more effective regulatory systems in digital communication environments.

The autonomy of the legal terminology system is a key aspect of China’s legal modernization. The evolution of legal terminology not only reflects linguistic adjustments but also embodies the dynamic interaction between the legal system and societal development. This study adopts a corpus-based approach to explore the construction of an autonomous legal terminology system using texts from China’s criminal procedure legislation. Through both quantitative and qualitative analyses of legislative texts from different historical periods, the study identifies patterns of terminological variation and the underlying influencing factors. The findings suggest that changes in legal terminology are closely tied to developments within the legal system and are significantly shaped by external factors such as political, cultural, economic, social, and technological changes. This study argues that achieving autonomy in China’s legal terminology system requires balancing the preservation of traditional legal culture with the need for terminological innovation to support the rule of law. Strengthening the autonomy of China’s legal terminology system will contribute to domestic legal reforms and enhance China’s presence in global legal discourse.

In the courtroom, participants engage in a battle of power through rhetoric, where appraisal and cognitive theories serve as discursive weapons. By leveraging attitudinal resources and conceptual metaphors, participants showcase their ideologies, seeking to bolster their position in the power dynamics of the courtroom, striving to sway the balance of judicial power in their favor. By conducting a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of a self-built Chinese court trial corpus, this study proposes the Cognitive-Functional Courtroom Discourse Model, offering a fresh multidimensional theoretical perspective for analyzing courtroom discourse. It is found that the allocation and distribution of attitudinal resources in the courtroom indicates the intricate power dynamics and role assignments among court participants, among which the assessment of the admissibility, legitimacy and reliability of evidence is crucial in the interaction between different court subjects. In addition, the use of courtroom metaphors reveals the intricate nature of cases and the strategic maneuvers employed by discourse participants in the courtroom. Practically, this study offers resource references and strategic guidance for evaluating and analyzing courtroom discourse, which helps enhance the efficiency of courtroom communication and fulfill the judiciary’s function.

African American author Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Annie John , published in 1985 after being serialized in The New Yorker , is widely regarded by literary critics as a classic Bildungsroman. The novel Annie John provides readers with a snapshot of the social situation of women in colonial Antigua, demonstrating intergenerational conflicts and shifts in women’s traditional identities through the portrayal of distinctive female characters, thus hinting at the development of laws concerning women’s rights and protection in Antigua. This paper attempts to analyze the novel from the perspective of the rights and interests of Annie’s mother as a married woman, that of Annie as a child in the family and society, and that of Annie as a teenager in the schoolyard, combining relevant laws before and after the independence of Antigua and Barbuda to explore the gradual awakening of women and the gradual improvement of women’s rights in a traditional colonial society. It also offers a more equal and inclusive way to reflects on the development of women in contemporary society.