The Law and Critical Discourse Studies

This book provides a range of highly accessible approaches from Discourse Studies for analyzing legal language in legislation, documents, proceedings and in news media reporting.

In this insightful volume, scholars from both Law and Linguistics come together to provide a range of approaches from Discourse Studies for analyzing legal language in legislation, documents and proceedings and in news media reporting. The book begins with tackling exactly why such approaches are hugely helpful and valuable for understanding the nature of legal language and how it is used. The chapters, written in an accessible manner, show how discourse analysis can be used to throw light on the ideas and values which can be buried in legal language. The book provides a valuable resource for researchers wishing to carry out their own research or for use in teaching.

The Law and Critical Discourse Studies will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of law, language and linguistics, discourse studies, sociology, and media and cultural studies.This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Discourse Studies.

Le Cheng is Professor in Guanghua Law School, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. He is Executive Vice Dean of the Academy of International Strategy and Law and Vice Chairman of Cybersecurity Strategy and Law Committee of China. He is Editor of International Journal of Legal Discourse and Co-editor of Social Semiotics. He has published widely in discourse studies and semiotics, in relation to law and cyber governance.

David Machin is Professor in the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, Shanghai International University, China. He works in the area of discourse studies and multimodal analysis. His publications include Doing Visual Analysis (2018); Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (2020); and How to do Critical Discourse Analysis (2023). He is co-editor of the journal Social Semiotics.