Legal Pragmatics

The volume Legal Pragmatics is a contribution to the interface between language and law. It looks at how the principles of language use can be beneficial to clarifying legal issues, its twelve chapters (together with the Introduction) offering a wide spectrum of the latest approaches to the area of legal pragmatics. The four chapters in the first section are devoted to historical pragmatics and take a diachronic look at old courtroom records. Written legal language is also the focus of the four chapters in the next section, dealing with the pragmatics of modern legal writing. The chapters in the third section, devoted to modern legal language, touch upon both the discourse in the courtroom and in police investigation. Finally, the two chapters in the last section on legal discourse and multilingualism address a topic very relevant to the modern era of globalisation -- the position of legal discourse in multilingual contexts.

Dakota Wing, York University, Toronto, on Linguist List 30.279 (17 January 2019):
As a whole, ‘Legal Pragmatics’ provides an insightful overview of the applications of pragmatics to various legal contexts. Each chapter approaches a relevant issue and contributes not only to the wider field of language and law (or forensic linguistics), but also advances the practical applications of using principles of linguistics to reveal, investigate, and suggest solutions to pressing issues. The global aspect of this book truly makes it a valuable resource to linguists, lawyers, legal scholars, historians, sociologists, and law enforcement personnel around the world.