Volume 4, Issue 1 -

Kraken theory aims at showing that legal theory and practice are not built as a single block, but are more a kind of tentacular movement of positionality and legal powers, offering competing theoretical and practical angles from which Kraken and Octopus can choose their distinctive moves to act for and/or against #MeToo. It shows how these varieties of rumors are distributed in #MeToo, when they may scrutinize their next strategic moves (be it at the surface or for purposes of defamation), and why the mechanism of distinctiveness inherent in this hashtag is explored within the spatio-temporal perspectives of U.S.A. and France.

Legal language and its translation are considerably more complex than scientific and technical translation because the legal object is a text that performs an action. For this reason it is not only necessary to consider the legal terminology but also the structure of the text itself as well as the verbs used and their performative act. In this paper, we explore how the analysis of terminological meaning in legal texts can be addressed from the perspective of Frame-Based Terminology (FBT), a cognitive approach to domain-specific language, which directly links specialized knowledge representation to cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics. In a case study on international agreements in the context of environmental law, we analyze the argument structure of verbs as well as the conceptual categories of their semantic arguments providing insights into the semantic profile of this text type. The representation of the verb class and its semantic arguments can be considered a type of interlingua that could be used as a basis for translation.

At present, there exist several difficulties in the criminal regulation of illegal fundraising activities on China’s P2P platforms, such as discovering, identifying, tracking, and preventing. To solve these difficulties in the criminal regulations, this study applies the problem-oriented approach to evaluate the meaning constructions of illegal fundraising behavior on online P2P lending platforms in the corresponding judicial identifications, that is, judicial regulations and interpretations. After analyzing the judicial documents of 192 criminal cases in China, this study finds that it is necessary to actively draw on successful extra-territorial experience, and further establish a reasonable balance between maintaining financial security and promoting financial innovation. Specifically, the judiciary could adjust the current single loose criminal policy into one that combines leniency with rigidity, perfect the criminal law and its interpretation system of illegal fundraising behavior on P2P platforms, strengthen the connection mechanism of punishment and execution, explore the specialized case-handling mechanism, and implement a case guidance system.

Researchers studying the language of law agree that there is a number of certain features which are characteristic of the legal genre, regardless of the language of the legal text. Among the most commonly listed features of lingua legis are: conventionalised sentences, performative verbs, Latinisms, euphemisms, and time expressions. The paper provides a discussion of these features, as well as provides examples of their occurrence in Polish, English, and Indonesian legal texts. The analised corpus includes the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia, the Constitution of the Republic of Poland, The Constitution of the United States of America with amendments, Polish and Indonesian Civil Codes (clauses concerning obligations), together with a set of parallel texts of rental agreements and real estate sale contracts.

This article examines the ways in which states can exercise dispersed disciplinary power as exemplified in a selective erasure of gender from Indiana’s Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws. To do this, this article investigates a critical discourse analysis using Indiana’s TRAP laws that have been brought to the floor of the state legislature from 2013–2018. The major narrative present throughout these texts is an intentional re-framing of gendered subjectivity or who gets to be called “woman”. Such state-driven discourse has the power to regulate social norms. Such norms and language assumptions often find their way into policy, including those defining how women can act or not act in regard to the termination of a pregnancy. Thus, by examining how TRAP laws deploy certain discourse, one better understands how the state, via legislation, takes an active role in controlling the public sphere by becoming an institutionalized pattern of interpretation.

The literature has long explored the Web as corpus for language research and practice. However, little has been written on the Web as a legal language resource. This paper is aimed at exploring the Web as a tool which can provide answers to legal language queries. In this respect, it will show how Google advanced search and the WebCorp Web concordancer can shed light on legal language and bring recurrent patterns to the surface. To this aim, a few issues will be addressed touching upon the query search syntax, the choice of the best translation candidates, the extraction of frequent collocations, the noticing of high recurrences, etc. Considering the shortcomings and the advantages of Google advanced search and of the WebCorp Web concordancer, the paper findings will argue that the Web as corpus can be a reliable legal language resource as long as a selection of tools are used, and the query syntax is accurate.