Volume 7, Issue 2

TuneIn is a case dealing with a portal service on the Internet that allows users to listen to Internet radio stations from around the world and even to select stations that play their favorite music at any given moment in time. The UK courts had to decide whether TuneIn’s activity amounted to a communication to the public of the music played by the radio stations. Because it is not authorized, it will constitute copyright infringement. The courts established that TuneIn did target the public in the UK and that on that basis, there was a communication to the public. In a Brexit context, the court refused to diverge from the caselaw of the Court of Justice of the European Union and put in place stringent requirement for future cases that may warrant any such divergence.

Deciphering the hidden political implications in legal discourse has become hot foci in the study of international politics to unravel the political roles and positionings of various stakeholders in law as well as its enforcement and adjudication. Drawing on CDA approach, this study provides a text mining of 12 extradition hearings on Meng Wanzhou case. The findings of the present study indicate that the case is in the name of law but actually with the nature of politics in the context of the U.S.–China trade war. It also demonstrates evidence of manipulation of political power and reframing of the event occurrences throughout the texts of the 12 hearings, by exerting the repetitive use of a bundle of legal discursive strategies. The violation of justice and equality in the legal discourse around the present case is based on the superior status of the U.S. in contrast with Canada in the discursive practices as well as the political contemplation of Canada, resulting in challenges to the fundamental principles of rule of law around the world. This research furthers the understanding of the strategies and entanglement of justice and injustice, power and control in the process of discourse construction.

This article explores the role of metadiscourse in the realization of judges’ persuasive strategies in challenging the reasoning of the majority opinion. In particular, the article describes how dissenting judges exploit the boosting features to produce convincing arguments and control the power relationship with an audience. The findings are based on a linguistic analysis of 27 judicial dissents by judges of the Russian Constitutional Court. As regards the choice of boosting devices to be searched in the corpus, the present work adopts Hyland et al.’s (2021) taxonomy of boosters. The study shows that Russian judges make extensive use of boosters to show disagreement and challenge the majority opinion. The results have implications for our understanding of judicial dissenting as a legal genre which has been understudied in the literature, and for teaching legal writing to law students. I suggest that judge’s competence in presenting arguments includes a developed knowledge of metadiscourse.

The abolition of the judicial interpretation issued by the Supreme People’s Court of the People’s Republic of China in Qi Yuling’s case marks the end of the trend of developing a judicial constitutional review system in China, but issues of courts invoking constitutional norms in judicial decisions continue to arise. This essay investigates the actual situation of the Constitution in judicial decisions by categorizing 1907 court decisions that invoked the Constitution as the reasoning basis and the court decisions which invoked the Constitution as the decision-making basis and by exploring the logic of the use of the Constitution by Chinese judges. In the absence of a constitutional review system, the primary sense of Chinese judges invoking constitutional norms is characterized by “simplistic reasoning”, “politicized enforcement” and the “parent law” concept. The insufficient judgment reason is a universal feature of judicial adjudication in Chinese courts. However, due to the lack of a constitutional review system, the poor perception of the interpretation and application of the constitution may exacerbate the lack of legal arguments invoked by the Constitution. The political model of Constitution enforcement in China makes judges invoke the Constitution in judicial decisions by “asserting the prestige of the Constitution”, which leads to numerous errors in legal argumentation in judicial decisions. This also reflects the tendency of “political enforcement” to take precedence over the legal enforcement of the Constitution. The influence of the old “parent law” concept is that judges can arbitrarily apply constitutional norms directly to civil cases, including fundamental rights norms. By summarizing and describing the above three features, we can depict the activities of current Chinese courts in invoking the Constitution.

This article investigates stancetaking by judicial opinion writers in the U.S. Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence. It examines the performative use of two kinds of stance evaluations, i.e., epistemic (im)probability and evidential (dis)belief. Using several sub-corpora, it contrasts the previously mentioned stance evaluations in majority opinions (168,329 words) and dissent opinions (105,517 words), thus contributing to a further understanding of the common law phenomenon of separate opinion writing. In light of the court’s decision to overrule this area of law and return it to the state level, this article also contrasts the use of performative stance evaluations in relation to two key jurisprudential issues: viability and state interests. The results show that dissent writers used a significantly greater number of stance evaluation markers. Although confidence levels varied across the different results, dissent writers also used significantly greater amounts of high certainty/strength markers when responding to majority opinions. This represented a kind of discursive escalation in which dissent writers diverged from majority opinions and expressed stronger counterstances. The article closes with a discussion of the major implications for the current law and directions for discourse research in a post-Roe legal landscape.

Extortion of confessions through torture is a serious problem in China’s criminal justice. Extraterritorial experiences can help China tackle this problem. The optimization of the prevention mechanism of the extortion of confessions through torture in China should be based on extraterritorial experiences. This study focuses on the themes related to extortion of confessions: disciplining criminal law network of extortion of confessions through torture, controlling time and place of interrogation strictly; solidifying suspects’ right of silence, guaranteeing the enactment of the exclusion rule of evidence illegally obtained, and exploring and establishing a lay visitor inspection system. Based on the findings obtained in the empirical study, we hope implications can be provided for the studies on curbing extortion of confessions in other jurisdictions.