Law, Language and Communication
About the Book Series
This series encourages innovative and integrated perspectives within and across the boundaries of law, language and communication, with particular emphasis on issues of communication in specialized socio-legal and professional contexts. It seeks to bring together a range of diverse yet cumulative research traditions related to these fields in order to identify and encourage interdisciplinary research. The series welcomes proposals - both edited collections as well as single authored monographs - emphasizing critical approaches to law, language and communication, identifying and discussing issues, proposing solutions to problems, offering analyses in areas such as legal construction, interpretation, translation and de-codification.
Anne Wagner is Professor of Legal Semiotics and Research Professor at Centre de Recherche Droits & Perspectives du Droit, équipe René Demogue, Lille University, France. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (Springer) and President of the International Roundtables for the Semiotics of Law. She has been awarded the National Research Grant for her research career. Her main research interests include semiotics, verbal and non-verbal sign system analyses, language and law, legal culture and heritage, legal translation, legal terminology, and legal discourse studies.
Vijay K. Bhatia, formerly Professor of English, City University of Hong Kong, is now Adjunct Professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Visiting Professor at the Hellenic American University, Athens (Greece). He is also the founding President of the Languages for Specific Purposes and Professional Communication Association for Asia-Pacific. His research interests include Critical Genre Analysis, academic and professional discourses in legal, business, newspaper, and promotional contexts; ESP and Professional Communication; simplification of legal and other public documents; intercultural and cross-disciplinary variations in professional genres.
Textual Interpretation in the Law: What Words Say, and How Judges Read Them
1st Edition
By N. H. E Diamond
October 30, 2026
How do courts choose among competing readings of a text? This work draws on linguistics, philosophy of language, hermeneutics, and literary criticism for insights into how texts impart meaning. Through vivid examples and in-depth case studies—of reported judicial decisions rather than stylized ...
Transforming Legal Communication: Cognitive and Multimodal Approaches
1st Edition
Edited
By Ruth Breeze, Magdalena Szczyrbak
September 09, 2026
This book examines creative new ways in which legal and administrative information are communicated to diverse audiences. Using a range of theoretical frameworks, it explores these transformations within broader societal issues such as legal activism, access to justice, and citizen participation. ...
Human Rights Discourse: Linguistics, Genre and Translation at the European Court of Human Rights
1st Edition
By Jekaterina Nikitina
July 20, 2026
This book explores the concept of human rights as constructed in language, shedding light on discursive and professional practices at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), as differentiated from other judicial institutions offering human rights defence mechanisms. It unveils the system of ...
Law and Cognitive Linguistics: A Prototype Theory Approach to Legal Categorisation
1st Edition
By Mateusz Zeifert
July 20, 2026
This book advances the prototype theory of categorisation within a legal context. The work adopts a multidisciplinary approach and draws on insights from cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, and analytic philosophy to discuss semantic problems present in law. Designed as a bridge between ...
Language and Legal Judgments: Evaluation and Argument in Judicial Discourse
1st Edition
By Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski
October 27, 2025
Integrating research methods from linguistics with contemporary legal argumentation theory, this book highlights the complexities of legal justification by focusing on the role of value-laden language in argument construction and use. The combination of linguistic analysis and the pragma-dialectic ...
The Logic of Legal Argumentation: Multi-Modal Perspectives
1st Edition
By Marko Novak
October 27, 2025
Multi-modal argumentation with its logical, emotional, visceral and kisceral arguments is an important addition to logical argumentation, especially when real-life situations are considered. It does not discard logic but adds other modes of argumentation to complement it, to emphasize the realistic...
Discrimination and Access to Justice in Africa: Language, Vulnerability and Social Inclusion in Southern and Eastern Africa
1st Edition
Edited
By Wellman Kondowe, Paul Svongoro
May 27, 2025
There are different forms of discrimination. Among others, people can be discriminated against on the basis of their ethnic grouping, political affiliation, race, gender, age, and language. This book focuses on linguistic discrimination in Africa, acknowledging that language plays a key role in the...
Ambiguity in EU Law: A Linguistic and Legal Analysis
1st Edition
By Sofiya Kartalova
May 27, 2024
Ambiguity – an expression or utterance giving rise to at least two mutually exclusive interpretations – has been traditionally regarded as an ever-present, and therefore trivial, feature of EU law, alongside other forms of linguistic indeterminacy. At the same time, ambiguity has been condemned as ...
Fair Trial Rights and Multilingualism in Africa: Perspectives from Comparable Jurisdictions
1st Edition
By Catherine S. Namakula
May 27, 2024
This book examines the best language fair trial practices of the courts in arguably the most multilingual region of the world. It contains an instructive list of standards and approaches to linguistic dynamics, which may be considered a language fair trial rights code. By way of jurisprudential ...
Law, Language and the Courtroom: Legal Linguistics and the Discourse of Judges
1st Edition
Edited
By Stanislaw Gozdz Roszkowski, Gianluca Pontrandolfo
May 31, 2023
This book explores the language of judges. It is concerned with understanding how language works in judicial contexts. Using a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, it looks in detail at the ways in which judicial discourse is argued, constructed, interpreted and perceived. ...
Rhetoric of InSecurity: The Language of Danger, Fear and Safety in National and International Contexts
1st Edition
By Victoria Baines
January 09, 2023
This book demands that we question what we are told about security, using tools we have had for thousands of years. The work considers the history of security rhetoric in a number of distinct but related contexts, including the United States’ security strategy, the "war" on Big Tech, and current ...
Law and Imagination in Troubled Times: A Legal and Literary Discourse
1st Edition
Edited
By Richard Mullender, Matteo Nicolini, Thomas D.C. Bennett, Emilia Mickiewicz
February 01, 2022
This collection focuses on how troubled times impact upon the law, the body politic, and the complex interrelationship among them. It centres on how they engage in a dialogue with the imagination and literature, thus triggering an emergent (but thus far underdeveloped) field concerning the ‘legal ...