Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics

Abstract

This essay is a survey of methods applied and topics scrutinized in legal-linguistic studies. It starts with the elucidation of the epistemic interest that led to the emergence and to the subsequent expansion of the mainstream legal-linguistic knowledge that we dispose of today. Thus, the essay focuses upon the development of problem awareness in the emerging legal-linguistic studies as well as upon the results of research that might be perceived as the state of the art in the mainstream legal linguistics. Meanwhile, some methodologically innovative tilts and twists that enrich and inspire contemporary legal linguistics are considered as well. Essentially, this essay traces the conceptual landscape in which the paradigms of legal-linguistic studies came about. This conceptual landscape extends from the research into the isolated words of law and the style used by jurists to the scrutiny of legal texts and legal discourses in all their socio-linguistic complexity. Within this broad frame of reference, many achievements in legal-linguistic studies are mentioned in order to sketch the consequences of processes in which legal-linguistic paradigms take shape. The author concludes upon a vision of legal linguistics called pragmatic legal linguistics as the newest stage in the intellectual enterprise that aims to pierce the language of the law and by so doing to understand law better.

Full text

Comparative Legilinguistics
vol. 47/2021
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/cl-2021-0011
CONCEPTUAL ORIGINS
OF LEGAL LINGUISTICS
MARCUS GALDIA
Dr. phil., Dr. iur., Associate Professor of Law
International University of Monaco
14, rue Hubert Clérissi
MC 98000 Monaco
mgaldia@monaco.edu
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0490-5213
Abstract: This essay is a survey of methods applied and topics scrutinized in
legal-linguistic studies. It starts with the elucidation of the epistemic interest
that led to the emergence and to the subsequent expansion of the mainstream
legal-linguistic knowledge that we dispose of today. Thus, the essay focuses
upon the development of problem awareness in the emerging legal-linguistic
studies as well as upon the results of research that might be perceived as the
state of the art in the mainstream legal linguistics. Meanwhile, some
methodologically innovative tilts and twists that enrich and inspire
contemporary legal linguistics are considered as well. Essentially, this essay
traces the conceptual landscape in which the paradigms of legal-linguistic
studies came about. This conceptual landscape extends from the research into
the isolated words of law and the style used by jurists to the scrutiny of legal

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
18
texts and legal discourses in all their socio-linguistic complexity. Within this
broad frame of reference, many achievements in legal-linguistic studies are
mentioned in order to sketch the consequences of processes in which legal-
linguistic paradigms take shape. The author concludes upon a vision of legal
linguistics called pragmatic legal linguistics as the newest stage in the
intellectual enterprise that aims to pierce the language of the law and by so
doing to understand law better.
Keywords: inquiries into the language of law; legal linguistics and its method;
legal-linguistic topics; mainstream legal linguistics; future legal linguistics.
Introduction
The scrutiny of legal language in scholarly contexts begins with the
upcoming of the epistemic interest in legal-linguistic matters. This
interest could not have been satisfied in the existing areas of knowledge,
and most prominently not in the legal doctrine, which focused upon the
content of legal regulation and not upon the way in which this
regulation was communicated. Therefore, a heuristic leap became
necessary in order to create an area of knowledge in its own right in
order to answer the questions that emerged when interested linguists
and other social scientists approached the language of law. As so often,
this new area of knowledge that is called here legal linguistics did not
emerge all at once. It passed stages, often perceived as final yet finally
proven temporary, such as the interdisciplinary law and language
studies to reach higher and to reach wider. In order to accomplish the
task to create a new area of knowledge the legal linguists needed a
method. However, this method could not be purely linguistic, nor could
it be purely legal as our experience teaches us that these methods do not
allow to answer the most pertinent legal-linguistic questions. Hence,
legal linguists needed to reach beyond the methodological fields of
linguistics and of legal studies to formulate a set of methodological
presuppositions that could be called legal-linguistic. Thus, preliminary
methods were hammered out from the amalgam of different areas of
knowledge and from methodological approaches that allowed the legal-
linguistic research to continue in a more systematic way.
Following their preliminary methods, the pioneers of legal
linguistics such as David Mellinkoff, Gérard Cornu, Edeltraud Bülow,

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
19
Heikki E.S. Mattila, and Peter M. Tiersma approached the legal
language and described its characteristic features. Initially, legal
linguists determined the vocabulary of law as the domain of their
specific interest. Soon, however, they had to adjust their narrow concept
of legal language to the results of their studies. They had to broaden
their approach to legal language and cover more than the vocabulary of
law that many of them determined rather strictly. This meant that a
move became necessary from vocabulary that was exclusively legal, for
instance promissory estoppel, to the words of law in broader contexts,
such as accident that appear in legal settings, yet not exclusively.
Furthermore, the initial interest in the legal style led them to consider
wider linguistic units that transgress the limits of isolated vocabulary,
and that consist of lexemes and syntagmas that constitute legal terms.
Legal linguists discovered that legal terminology, which stroke them
first, functions within broader linguistic structures and that it is better
understood within them than in isolation. These broader linguistic
structures were texts, written and oral. Yet legal texts proved
multifaceted so that their further classification into legal text types
became necessary to explain how the legal language works. It became
also apparent that not the legal terminology, but the legal text type
constitutes the main problem in the understanding of legal texts.
Nowadays, in the epoch marked by the internet an unknown word in a
legal text can be relatively easily elucidated by the speaker, yet textual
structures in which law is expressed are more challenging because law
manifests itself in systematically interrelated textual units, such as
provisions in a legal code. Interrelations of textual structures are not
visible in texts and therefore cause problems in their understanding. No
easily available factual knowledge on the screen of a smartphone
enables us to explain such structurally complex textuality of law. This
discovery concerns both professionals of law and lay persons because
both are able to cope with unknown words, yet they are much less expert
in handling complex textual structures. What is more, legal texts are not
static and preformulated. They emerge in legal discourses that shape
legal texts, both oral and written. The understanding of processes in
which law is formed and applied linguistically equals the understanding
of law in legal linguistics. This, in short, is the first stage of the
formation of legal-linguistic knowledge available today. In the
following, I will expand the issues sketched above, then critically
address some of the classical legal-linguistic findings and their deficits.
I will also mention certain promising developments in contemporary

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
20
legal-linguistic research and sketch a specific area in legal-linguistic
studies that integrates and broadens the discussed topics and that I call
pragmatic legal linguistics. Meanwhile, I will not discuss the
conception and the achievements of pragmatic legal linguistics in this
essay, mainly due to space concerns. I will come back to it in another
publication.
As far as the structure of my essay is concerned I would like to
mention what follows: In footnotes to the main text, the reader will find
examples of legal-linguistic reasoning and small case studies that make
clearer how the legal linguist works. Throughout the text, new terms
will be italicized whenever they appear for the first time. Occasionally,
summaries of the state of the art concerning the specific topic in
question will appear in footnotes as well. Additionally, surveys of
scholarly writings that render most important research concerning the
discussed topic will be treated in the footnotes to the main text. The
footnotes do no aspire to exhaust the topic addressed in them, yet they
enable at least the first orientation in the legal-linguistic debate about it.
Finally, there is reason to mention that the author while trying to state
the results of the mainstream legal-linguistic research needed to take a
distance from his own point of view upon certain legal-linguistic
matters. Indeed, the author does not belong, nor is he perceived in legal-
linguistic writings as belonging to the mainstream legal linguistics. He
represents an alternative approach to mainstream currents that might be
called pragmatic legal linguistics, which in his works
uncompromisingly appears as critical legal discourse.
Now, it is time to start discussing in more detail what was
sketched in the above outline of legal-linguistic developments and focus
upon the stages in which contemporary legal linguistics was formed. I
propose to start with a chronologically structured overview that is based
on my participation in legal-linguistic studies, first as a university
student and then as a researcher, during the past forty years. Looking
back, I am grateful for the unique opportunity that I had to witness some
of the developments that I now describe in proximity to many eminent
legal linguists.

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
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Emergence of interest in legal-linguistic subject matters
The emergence of the area of scholarly studies called legal linguistics
in the twentieth century was caused by the increased interest of linguists
and legal theoreticians in the role that language plays in law.
1
Jurists,
1
The most striking legal-linguistic issue that attracted the attention of researchers and
caused the emergence of legal linguistics was semantic in nature. It concerns primarily
the application of law that is perceived not only by legal linguists as the central issue in
legal science and in legal linguistics. For some scholars, law appeared as a matter of
words, for others as a matter of a specific style of reasoning expressed in a language
build up around conceptual structures. This type of semantic interest in legal-linguistic
matters is valid even today, although its consequences reach nowadays further than in
the past when it was originally apprehended. Therefore, one can explain it with the help
of a contemporary case. Regularly, the legal linguist will be captivated by the wording
of a statute in relation to its application in a case. A typical interpretive dilemma may
illustrate this problem: Police units in the U.S. frequently involve dogs when arresting
suspects. What follows from the legal regulation when a police dog bites a suspect? In
South Carolina, there is statutory law concerning liability for dog bites. According to
the South Carolina State Statute 47-3-110, “whenever any person is bitten or otherwise
attacked by a dog while the person is in a public place or is lawfully in a private place,
including the property of the owner of the dog or other person having the dog in his
care or keeping, the owner of the dog or other person having the dog in his care or
keeping is liable for the damages suffered by the person bitten or otherwise attacked.”
Does this provision concern our case? The arrested suspect who was bitten by a police
dog would probably say yes and refer to the wording of the statutory provision. At least,
he could claim, nothing in the provision’s wording contradicts the assumption that
police dogs are concerned by it as whatever other dogs. The police would probably say
no and explain that the statutory provision does not concern police dogs acting in the
line of duty. Best linguists will not be able to answer the question whether the provision
concerns police dogs. The reason for this intricacy is that we do not have to do in this
case with a linguistic, but with a legal-linguistic question. Judges are better qualified to
answer such questions than linguists. Yet they will not be able to provide an
unequivocal and generally accepted answer to our question either. Therefore, legal
linguists analyse the knowledge that judges have about law and the linguistic form of
expression of the knowledge that judges apply in their judgments. They are interested
in the way how judges determine the meaning of such provisions and authoritatively
answer questions such as the one asked in this case. Meanwhile, the task of legal
linguists is not to solve the semantic question for the judge but to research meaning
alternatives in legal texts and to use the results of their inquiries in order to construct
the theory of the legal language. In the context of our case, legal linguists will also take
into consideration that the South Carolina legislator perceived the provision in question
as ambiguous. Since 2013, an amendment makes an exception for certified, on duty
police dogs responding to lawful commands or otherwise acting in accordance with
their training. According to the new provision, both dog and handler must follow policy
and may not use excessive force. Otherwise, the police will be liable for dog bites.
Furthermore, legal, and not legal-linguistic, are for instance questions such as whether

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
22
at least good jurists, were since antiquity aware of the particular role of
language in law, yet they approached language intuitively or at best
with the means of philosophical analysis that was impressive yet
usually much too general to capture the specific features of the legal
language. Historically, the main area of interest of jurists was the
question of what the legal regulation says, for instance that regular
speed on roads in towns is limited to fifty kilometers per hour.
Questions of this sort dominate the view of many jurists upon law even
today. Doubtless, jurists dealt also with communicative aspects of law,
yet largely on the margin of their studies. The reason for this
discrepancy seems to be that the legal science lacked a suitable method
to approach law in its linguistic dress. General linguistics of the last
century, starting with structuralism, generative transformational
grammar, neo- and poststructuralism, and later also general semiotics,
linguistic pragmatics, discourse theory, and cognitive linguistics
provided more appropriate linguistic research matrices to approach the
specific object of studies that was called legal language in a
theoretically better founded way. Applied linguistics, with its
experience in terminological research, translation, and glottodidactics
contributed additional theoretical knowledge that channeled legal-
linguistic interests into a form of expression that enabled the
incorporation of the legal-linguistic research into broader contexts of
social sciences. This channeling of intuitive and spontaneous interest of
jurists and social scientists in the language of law gave rise to the
abundant legal-linguistic research available today. This research has a
two-fold structure that makes the form of expression in legal linguistics
better understandable. Particularly, some legal linguists perceived legal
linguistics as a complementary area of knowledge to the existing legal
theory and to the legal doctrine that dominates the study of law. Other
legal linguists reflected upon the emergence of the interest in legal-
linguistic subject matters more critically and stressed the deficits of the
traditional legal doctrine and the overly broad and undetermined
approach to legal language in the mainstream legal theory as driving
claims for compensation in cases such as ours are usually decided by judges or whether
they are practically settled out of court as well as the amount of damages paid to victims
of police dog bites. The newspaper Greenville News reported in 2013 that out of court
settlements between the South Carolina police and victims of police dog bites may
amount to three hundred thousand dollars in a case. This may be an interesting piece of
news for a lawyer, but it is not an information apt to attract the attention of a legal
linguist.

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
23
forces behind the efforts to come to terms with the legal language.
Indeed, traditional legal studies proved largely deficient in this respect
as they mainly exposed the linguistic character of law, both in teaching
and in research, yet were not able to interpret convincingly the issues
that they discovered. In fact, law is a linguistic phenomenon because it
manifests itself linguistically and in no other way. It does not make
much sense to research it as something else. Meanwhile, jurists who
researched law, i.e. its language, as they could not research anything
else, approached the language of law using all but linguistic methods.
Their methods were mainly limited to positivist doctrinal studies that
reach down to the Middle Ages. It cannot surprise that such largely
implicit methodology could not satisfy legal-linguistic ambitions. At
this point, legal linguists emerged in their quality of scholars who were
able to identify, to address, and to clarify issues discovered in doctrinal
and general legal-theoretical studies. Legal linguistics was beginning to
take shape. Meanwhile, already at the very inception of the legal-
linguistic research activities two types of interest in legal-linguistic
matters became distinctive in different sorts of legal-linguistic studies
that today represents either affirmative or critical positions in the
research into the legal discourse. Therefore, paradigmatically, all
research into the legal language can be divided along ideological lines
as either affirmative or critical of law and its institutions. Finally, in
terms of heuristics, it is necessary to stress that legal linguistics due to
specific conditions in which the interest in the legal-linguistic matters
emerged was not a mechanical application of linguistic knowledge upon
law but an attempt to create a new area of knowledge that would clarify
problems discovered by inquisitive jurists and linguists. Not only in this
sense, yet also in this sense, it became a truly fascinating area of
intellectual exploration.
Expansion of problem awareness in legal-linguistic
studies
The upcoming of the interest in legal-linguistic matters led the
researchers to dealings with topics that they identified as central and
therefore worthwhile accurate scrutiny. It seems that the particular
vocabulary of jurists, perceived by some as cryptic, was the starting

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
24
point for many to deal with the language of law.
2
For others, the legal
style was decisive for the determination of the nature of the legal
language that began to emerge from the growing number of
publications on both named topics since the second half of the
nineteenth century, mostly in Europe.
3
Both topics corresponded to
interests in issues that might have been termed linguistic in the legal
positivism of the nineteenth century. Legal positivists were particularly
interested in a better, which meant for them a more precise wording of
statutes because they hoped that linguistically precise formulations
might solve the problem of the application of law. Since antiquity, the
task of the application of abstractly stated law to a case that the judge
was expected to decide was perceived as cumbersome. Therefore,
nineteenth century’s legal positivists hoped that when the legal
language, which for them consisted of legal concepts would become
unequivocal, all problems of law would be solved or at least simplified.
Today, we know that all these hopes were vain as language cannot be
artificially predetermined and semantically frozen. Even the most
precise legal concepts will always remain undetermined in a certain
sense. The discussion about the legal style was conducted with the same
positivist idea in mind. It was assumed in it that the more precise the
ways of expression of law in statutes and court opinions would be, the
higher would also be the degree of legal certainty in legal decisions. At
this time, jurists started to write about the legal language. This type of
writings, however, is not perceived by me as belonging to legal
2
The classic of the French legal linguistics, Gérard Cornu (2005: 13; 62-65),
determined the vocabulary of law as primarily consisting of terms exclusively used in
law such as antichrèse, nantissement, synallagmatique, and irréfragable. Meanwhile,
he had to revise and to broaden his appealing theoretical conception as he soon realized
its epistemic limits. Today, the vocabulary of law may comprise whatever lexical unit
that becomes relevant in a legal context, for instance mother-in-law, water, and
accident. In contemporary legal linguistics, the language of law can be defined only
functionally and contextually.
3
Legal style, defined in early studies rather arbitrarily, interested predominantly jurists
who wrote about law. Cf. Louis de Geer. 1985 (1853). Om den juridiska stilen,
Stockholm: Rediviva; Birger Wedberg. 1928. Lagstil. Några citat och reflektioner.
Stockholm: Norsted; Hans Dölle. 1949. Vom Stil der Rechtssprache. Tübingen: Mohr
Verlag; Pierre Mimin. 1970. Le style des jugements. 4th ed. Paris: Librairies Techniques;
François-Michel Schroeder. 1978. Le nouveau style judiciaire. Paris: Dalloz; Henry
Weihofen. 1980. Legal Writing Style. 2nd ed. St. Paul: West Publishing Co. In terms of
the legal-linguistic method, it might be perceived as controversial whether these
publications belong to legal linguistics. Contemporary approaches to legal style are
methodically more precise (cf. Mattila 2018: 113).

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
25
linguistics as it lacks any theoretical anchorage in linguistic methods
and displays spontaneous and speculative linguistic thought. These
writings are however an object of legal-linguistic studies as researchers
might discover in them numerous points of anchorage that shaped the
processes in which many central legal-linguistic inquiries emerged.
4
Last but not least, the intensification of research into legal translation
and the practical needs to know this area better led legal linguists to
another central traditional legal-linguistic topic. It was discovered or
rather made explicit that legal translation is specific in the sense that
legal languages that function communicatively in legal systems may
prove conceptually incongruent when compared for translation
purposes.
5
More generally, it was claimed in the more recent part of the
discussion about the legal translation that the legal language did not
know any uniform system of conceptual reference.
6
Therefore, the idea
came up that legal translation was an impossible undertaking, at least
theoretically (cf. Galdia 2017: 270-277). Meanwhile, the very existence
of many usefully translated legal texts and the possibility to correct
existing legal translations suggested rather the contrary theoretical
option. Indeed, the skopos-theory developed in general translation
studies proved instrumental in solving the most fundamental problem
4
I may mention for instance: Martin Grunau. 1961. Spiegel der Rechtssprache.
Flensburg: Verlag Kurt Gross; Fritz Schönherr. 1985. Sprache und Recht. Aufsätze und
Vorträge. Wien: Manz‘sche Verlags- und Universitätsbuchhandlung; Bernhard
Großfeld. 1990. Unsere Sprache: Die Sicht des Juristen. Opladen: Westdeutscher
Verlag. Furthermore, Bernhard Großfeld‘s “Sprache und Schrift als Grundlage unseres
Rechts”, in Juristenzeitung 1997/633, and his numerous other writings that emerged
beyond the paradigm of linguistics became influential among jurists and marked the
upcoming of the interest in legal-linguistic matters also among legal scholars dealing
predominantly with doctrinal issues. Additionally, in Großfeld’s writings the link to
comparative law appears in a way that became later paradigmatic within comparative
legal-linguistic studies. In the contemporary discussion, these issues were expanded and
cover the relations between legal cultures and legal languages (cf. Husa 2015; 2020).
5
In the way of example, for the common law term promissory estoppel there is no direct
equivalent term in the legal languages of the civil law. In the translation of a text
including this term the legal translator will have to create a new term that should best
represent the original term in the target language. In the language of chemistry, such
problems do not exist. Every chemical term, for instance carbon monoxide can be
unequivocally rendered in whatever other language that disposes of chemical
terminology, for instance in Chinese as 一氧化碳 (yī yǎng huà tàn).
6
Using semiotic terminology, Louis Beaudoin spoke about the “absence of universal
operational referents” in legal translation, cf. his Legal Translation in Canada, in The
Development of Legal Language, ed. H.E.S. Mattila, 2002, 115-130. Helsinki:
Kauppakaari.

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
26
of legal translation. It maintained that the total equivalence of the source
and the target language in translation cannot be expected. Meanwhile,
when the specific task facing the translator was duly determined than
translation became possible, and even satisfactory. Thus, the original
fundamental problem of legal translation was solved, and the theoretical
objection demystified as a misunderstanding. In fact, certain
theoreticians of legal translation all too often adopted a concept of
equivalence that did not suit natural languages. They confused
mathematical sameness (a sort of logical identity) with
communicational equivalence that functions in the languages that we
speak daily as well as in the legal language. Hence, the way to build up
a theory of legal translation was laid bare through this clarification and
legal translation developed into a particular area in legal linguistics that
dominates the work of many legal linguists.
7
This theory characterized
the nature of legal translation and developed additional topics that are
discussed today, such as quality assurance and the use of translation
tools.
8
This state of affairs is encouraging because legal linguistics
proves in its abundant legal-translatorial research its relevance to
society. On the other hand, by stressing or over-stressing the legal-
translatorial component, legal linguistics might divert attention from
many other, no less relevant legal-linguistic topics and problems. It is
therefore necessary to maintain that legal linguistics cannot be reduced
to issues of legal translation, which, in turn, should not be neglected in
it either.
As a result of these developments, around the first half of the
twentieth century many legal linguists had the impression that they
identified the most pertinent areas of legal-linguistic scrutiny, i.e. the
legal terminology and the legal style as constitutive of the legal
language, and the problem of terminological equivalence in legal
translation. Parts of the contemporary legal-linguistic research still
displays the anchorage in this sort of problem awareness, sometimes
however on a different, and higher level of abstraction. Meanwhile, the
7
Theoretical aspects of legal translation, and especially efforts to structure the
translation act were conceptualized in Aleksandra Matulewska’s parametric theory of
legal translation (cf. Matulewska 2013). They were further expanded in the conception
of the general legilinguistic translatology (cf. Kozanecka et al. 2017).
8
Cf. Fernando Prieto Ramos. 2015. Quality Assurance in Legal Translation: Evaluating
Process, Competence and Product in the Pursuit of Adequacy, International Journal for
the Semiotics of Law vol. 28 (1), 11-30; Marcus Galdia. 2013. Strategies and Tools for
Legal Translation, Comparative Legilinguistics vol. 16, 13-29.

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
27
initial interest in the scrutiny of isolated legal terms that corresponded
to legal concepts researched by jurists proved disappointing as the
linguistic knowledge of the characteristic features of language
contradicted the hopes of legal positivists. Additionally, the interest in
the legal style appeared disenchanting as traditional methods of the
analysis of style did not bring any results that could support the thesis
of the particularity of legal language. Therefore, broader
conceptualizations of topics, i.e. the expansion of the epistemic interest
in the legal language from style to text had to follow suit. However, also
issues concerning the structure, the scope and the aims of legal
linguistics became an issue for scholarly debates. Let us now have a
look at these problems that are closely related to material issues
discussed above. As a matter of fact, both topics concern problems of
the legal-linguistic method.
Legal linguistics is not alone
Although sometimes underestimated, the non-doctrinal interest in the
language of law led more or less simultaneously to the emergence of
different, not only strictly legal-linguistic approaches aiming at
elucidating the language of law. Next to legal linguistics, law and
language studies and forensic linguistics emerged in different
epistemological and paradigmatic contexts (cf. Gibbons 2003; Salmi-
Tolonen 2008). Law and language studies that are an Anglo-American
specialty aimed to establish a dialogue between jurists and linguists on
issues of their common interest.
9
Originally, in these studies jurists and
linguists were expected to discuss issues of common interest from the
9
Interdisciplinary law and language studies, sometimes transformed in the respective
publications into ‘language and law’ or ‘language in law’ studies can be approached in:
Frederick Schauer, (ed.). 1993. Law and Language. Aldershot/Hong Kong: Dartmouth;
Peter M. Tiersma, Lawrence M. Solan (eds.). 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Language
and Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press; and Ekkehard Felder, Friedemann Vogel
(eds.). 2017. Handbuch Sprache im Recht. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. In times of
expanding systematic legal-linguistic studies, traditional law and language or language
and law studies are apparently losing their impact as they cannot transgress their self-
imposed methodological limitations. They may be useful in rendering the state of the
art in a subsegment of legal-linguistic inquiries, yet they are methodically regressive as
far as the conception of the project of legal linguistics is concerned.

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
28
position of their respective methodical approaches to the discussed
subject matter. Today, law and language studies are also practiced by
specialists who regularly deal with issues discussed in legal linguistics.
Forensic linguistics emerged as a practical area where linguists were
assisting judicial institutions and the police in solving problems of these
institutions while using their professional knowledge. Particularly
important in it became speaker and author identification. In analogy
with the law and language studies, many forensic linguists deal today
also with topics created in legal linguistics, yet they maintain their
interest in the practical application of linguistic knowledge in
cooperation with juridical institutions. Legal linguists do not shy away
from contacts with authorities and they also provide assistance to them,
yet this type of assistance is not their primary concern. In fact, not every
inquiry into the legal language belongs to legal linguistics. This does
not mean that approaches to the legal language developed within other
than legal-linguistic paradigms would be irrelevant. They are rather
complementary as they show the multitude of perspectives and topics
that the legal doctrine as the main representative of the legal science
was inclined to deny or to neglect.
The naming issue
As was shown above, legal linguistics is not isolated among the areas
of knowledge interested in the scrutiny of legal language. This is a
positive trait in the development of research activities because
generally, when seen from the perspective of legal linguistics, whatever
sort of interest in legal language is valuable. Yet, as this interest
manifests itself in different colors, it becomes urgent to deal with the
issue what legal linguistics is and what it is not. The beginning of any
research activity in different parts of the world and by disconnected
researchers or groups of researchers may cause terminological
differences that may be methodically relevant or largely negligible.
This is also the case in the research into the language of law. This
question concerns in legal-linguistic studies the so-called naming issue.
The issue as such is not solved today. We can assume that the term legal
linguistics emerged in Continental Europe. Its first users were
Continental Europeans who also used the English language in their

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
29
writings. The original term was particularly productively used in France
as linguistic juridique and in Germany as Rechtslinguistik, which was
defined in the legal-linguistic lectures by Edeltraud Bülow. In
numerous European countries, the term was used in literal translations
as правовая лингвистика in Russian and νομική γλωσσολογία in
Greek. In China, the term falü yuyanxue (法律語言學/法律语言学) is
used (cf. Galdia 2017: 72-73). In Poland, next to general legal-linguistic
studies called juryslingwistyka, the Poznań school of legilinguistics
emerged as a specific current of general legal-linguistic studies. As of
today, it parametrized the legal translation, it clarified the deontic
modality in the legal language, and the general communicative aspects
of law as well as its specifics stated in the plain language attempts.
Scandinavian countries, following Heikki E.S. Mattila’s Finnish term
oikeuslingvistiikka coined equivalents such as the Swedish
rättslingvistik. In his English language treatises, Mattila started to call
his multilingual studies of the legal language comparative legal
linguistics. In the English-speaking world, the term legal linguistics is
also used, although law and language studies remain popular there,
especially among researchers who deal only occasionally with legal-
linguistic issues. It also remains in use for administrative purposes, for
instance in university libraries, where European legal-linguistic
research is classified as law and language studies. Yet, legal linguistics
is not a matter of scattered words but a discipline that researches legal
language methodically. Therefore, decisive for the naming of such
activities is the methodological choice exercised by the researcher and
not artistic concept creation. I assume that in the future course of the
development of the discipline also its name will be terminologically
consolidated. Meanwhile, the most important thing is that the research
object and the method applied in its scrutiny would be clearly expressed
in its name, whatever the final choice will be. Meanwhile, due to the
approximation of positions in legal linguistics, law and language studies
and forensic linguistics also their merger could be discussed.
10
The new
consolidated discipline would be better visible among existing areas of
knowledge and would become stronger in terms of its possible impact
upon governmental institutions and upon society at large.
10
Such tendency could be seen, for instance, in the publication by Friedemann Vogel
(ed.). 2019. Legal Linguistics Beyond Borders: Language and Law in a World of Media,
Globalisation and Social Conflict. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Cf. also Marijana
Javornik-Čubrić. 2018. Što je pravna lingvistika, Lingua Montenegrina vol. 22, 31-37.

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
30
Retrospective upon the origins of legal-linguistic
reflection
Methodological choices exercised by researchers are best understood
towards the background of conceptualization efforts around the
language of law. History of reflection about the role of the language in
law is different from the history of the scholarly discipline called legal
linguistics. Direct reference concerning the language of law can be
made to ancient Greek orators such as Corax of Syracuse as well as to
the writings of the ancient Roman jurists. What is more, Confucian
writings include in 論語 Lun Yu (ch. XIII, 3) the doctrine of the
rectification of names, (正名 zheng ming), which is fundamental to the
Chinese reflection upon language, also in legal contexts. Later, in the
Middle Ages, Thomas of Aquino shaped the medieval ideology of law
for the Occidental world. It is also important to stress that judges,
notably common law judges, in their legal opinions expressed thoughts
that imply contemporary, much more explicit and theoretically better-
founded legal-linguistic concepts. Generally, therefore, wherever in
antiquity and in the Middle Ages dialectic and rhetoric issues were
mentioned in contexts of the shaping or of the application of law, one
may perceive such writings as belonging to the history of the legal-
linguistic thought, although in different degree of immediate influence
and relevance. Meanwhile, Aristotle’s Ῥητορική (Rhetoric) can be
called the bible of the legal linguist as it marks the beginning of the
theoretical inquiry into the legal language and it also anticipates many
legal-linguistic topics.
Dealing with legal-linguistic roots documented in scholarly
writings is difficult because frequently the work in question does not
concern primarily the legal language. For instance, the Latin treatise
called Rhetorica ad C. Herennium, written some 80 years BOE, deals
with general issues of classical rhetoric. Yet it also mentions, although
marginally, issues of utmost importance for legal-linguistic studies.
This situation continues until our own day. Important legal-linguistic
knowledge is often mentioned on the margin of studies that deal with
the legal doctrine and with general legal theory by scholars who do not
call themselves legal linguists. Therefore, legal linguists have to distill
legal-linguistic knowledge from these works that are only implicitly
legal-linguistic. Yet these works should not be neglected because they
provide valuable observations and illustrative samples of the legal

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
31
language. Therefore, when seen in the historical perspective, the
intellectual frame of reference of legal linguists appears uneven,
because their anchorage in linguistics and in legal studies differs
considerably.
11
Meanwhile, it is possible to reconstruct a set of
theoretical postulates that have their roots in some classics of legal
theory, legal semiotics, and general linguistics. These postulates are
fundamental to the development of a fully-fledged legal linguistics of
the future. Next to these classical fundamentals, contemporary
theoretical claims inspire or at least should inspire new generations of
legal linguists.
Legal linguistics and legal semiotics
Studies that call themselves legal-linguistic appeared at the time of the
emergence of legal semiotics (cf. Jackson 1985). It is therefore justified
to ask in which relation legal semiotics and legal linguistics stand to
each other. The answer to this question largely depends upon the view
11
Classics of legal theory and of related areas of knowledge shaped the conception of
contemporary legal linguistics in multiple ways. Certain classical works are mandatory
reading for every legal linguist because they make clear the process in which legal
linguistics actually emerged. They are however written mainly by scholars who did not
perceive themselves as legal linguists. One may bear in mind particularly: François
Gény. 1921. Science et technique en droit privé positif, vol. 3, Paris: Sirey (in this book
the French term linguistique juridique was used for the first time in the history of this
discipline); Georg Henrik von Wright. 1951. Deontic Logics, Mind vol. 60, 1-15; R.M.
Hare. 1952. The Language of Morals. Oxford: Clarendon Press; Chaim Perelman, Lucie
Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1958. Traité de l’argumentation – La nouvelle rhétorique. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France; H.L.A. Hart. 1961. The Concept of Law. Oxford:
Clarendon Press; Alf Ross. 1966. Om ret og retfærdighed. En indførelse i den analytiske
retsfilosofi. København: Nyt Nordisk Forlag K. Busck; Ronald Dworkin. 1991. Law’s
Empire. London: Fontana Press; Robert Alexy. 1983. Theorie der juristischen
Argumentation. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp; Aulis Aarnio. 1987. The Rational as
Reasonable: A Treatise on Legal Argumentation. Dordrecht: Reidel; Nelson Goodman.
1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publ.; John Langshaw Austin. 1962.
How to Do Things with Words? Oxford: Oxford University Press; Jürgen Habermas.
1981. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, vol. 1 and 2, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Also, contemporary general legal theory is a source and a benchmark for legal-linguistic
studies. It inspires legal-linguistic research that is material (i.e. based on actual analyses
of the language in legal contexts) and it evaluates the legal-linguistic research towards
its own, non-material, theoretical conceptions of the legal language (cf. Lizisowa 2016:
17, 20; Marmor 2014; Andruszkiewicz 2016).

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
32
of the role that legal semiotics plays in general legal studies. Some
researchers perceive the legal-semiotic domain as limited to non-verbal
communication, for others it concerns explicitly the fundamentals of all
communication, and especially verbal communication. Due to the
specifics of law, non-verbal communication is limited in it.
12
Unlike our
daily communication, which may be efficient also non-verbally or
where substitution of verbal communication is possible by non-verbal
action, legal communication is primarily verbal communication. For
instance, the French Civil Code is unimaginable in whatever other form
of communication that is not a statement in words. One could therefore
also assume that there is nothing to show in law. Meanwhile, law as a
social phenomenon manifests itself also visually. From gestures of
actors in a trial, giggling among the public during court proceedings,
judges’ robes or their lack, to the architecture of court buildings and
custody places, law as a social phenomenon is also constituted by non-
verbal elements such as those named. While there is no evidence that
the visual aspects of law influence the decisions made by judges,
13
these
elements make clear how law is construed by its authors and those
exposed to it. We may furthermore assume that visual aspects of law
influence at least non-professionals of law and may be used to
intimidate and to discipline citizens, while no corresponding prove is
there regarding professionals of law, especially public prosecutors and
judges. Another important area of legal-semiotic inquiry in legal
linguistics are issues concerning the evaluation of facts in the light of
12
A specific case constitutes the mute law (diritto muto, a term coined by Giuseppe
Benedetti. 1999. Diritto e linguaggio. Variazioni sul ‘diritto muto’, Europa e diritto
privato vol. 1, 137-152). In postmodern societies, the use of language, especially in
contracting, can be limited to signing preformulated contract terms or buying tickets
from a machine without any possibility to negotiate verbally. The mute law is a
challenge to legal linguists who primarily focus upon verbal communication.
13
Attorneys-at-law regularly try to influence juries and judges emotionally by exposing
victims of crimes and torts in all their despair and desolation (cf. Hollaris v. Jankowski,
315 Ill. App. 154, 42 N.E. 20859. In this case, the representatives of the plaintiff obliged
him to testify in the trial and to stand on one leg, as the plaintiff – a small boy - lost his
other leg in a car accident. The judge deciding the appeal in this classical case noticed
this move and reacted to it through hardening at least the wording of his decision, if not
the decision itself.).

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
33
law.
14
Meanwhile, in my view, the most important area of intersection
between legal semiotics and legal linguistics is the one concerning the
structure of legal signs in the perspective of meaning emergence in law.
Legal semiotics that is based on general semiotics researches the signs
of law. General semiotics covers all sign systems, verbal and non-verbal
alike. Its main task is to explain how social communicative systems
produce signs that enable orientation in society. It proceeds in analogy
with the identification of signs in nature. Meanwhile, legal semiotics is
14
A Swedish court, Uddevalla tingsrätt, had to decide a criminal case in which a 23-
year old man was accused to have murdered his 17-year old girlfriend (cf. judgment B
3289-19 of 27 July 2020). The accused denied the crime altogether and refused to
provide any explanations concerning the incriminated facts. The facts of this criminal
case are not suitable for tender souls: The girlfriend of the accused was reported
missing. Therefore, police officers also searched the apartment in which the accused
and his girlfriend lived. They found the severed head of the girl concealed in the
apartment and some traces of blood on the floor. Subsequently, the man was arrested
and accused of murder and of desecration of a corpse. He was convicted on both
accounts by the unanimous court. His conviction as such is not controversial as the
severed head of the victim found in his apartment provided convincing evidence that
he was the murderer notwithstanding his denial. Criminologists estimate the probability
rate of criminal guilt in such cases as oscillating at ninety-five percent. Furthermore,
the conviction because of the desecration of the corpse of his victim is obvious, both in
law and in life, as parts of the body of a deceased person must be buried rather than
being stored in premises serving other purposes. Problematic is the sentencing of the
accused to lifelong imprisonment (practically this means today in Sweden circa 25 years
spent in prison). Yet, according to the Swedish penal law (today amended, yet at the
time of the commitment of the murder more lenient), the regular sentence to be expected
for murder was between fourteen and eighteen years. According to the interpretation of
the penal law given by the Swedish Supreme Court, only in cases of exceptionally brutal
and cruel murders could the court sentence the accused to lifelong imprisonment.
However, do the facts that are known allow the assumption that we have to do with an
exceptionally brutal and cruel murder? The court in Uddevalla decided that this was the
case. At this point in the case, a legal-semiotic analysis becomes urgent. It could lay
bare the presuppositions made by the court based on the known facts. The only
possibility we have when we try to determine the facts of the crime is to visualize the
scenery. We cannot reconstruct the criminal act in question with other means because
a major part of the victim’s body is missing. Therefore, we cannot know how she died.
Neighbors heard shouting coming from the apartment, therefore the court assumed that
the victim and her aggressor were fighting, the victim lying on the floor, as there were
blood traces there. The court further assumed that this struggle caused anguish in the
victim to lose her life. In fact, visualization in cases where language is missing (because
it cannot emerge) is dangerous in law. Unsurprisingly, the appeal of the accused
followed upon the judgment. The court that decided the appeal reduced the criminal
sanction to eighteen year of imprisonment due to problems with evidence concerning
the above-named circumstances (cf. Hovrätten för Västra Sverige, judgment B 4402-
20, October 23, 2020).

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
34
not only identifying legal signs, it also scrutinizes the procedures in
which we make use of them while trying to communicate, i.e. to
understand what signs in isolation or in complex structures actually
mean. As the interpretation of signs is one of the central issues of
general semiotics, legal semiotics is an underlying methodological
layer in all legal-linguistic approaches. Whatever approach to meaning
constitution is always semiotic, explicitly or implicitly. Explicit
semiotic approaches in legal linguistics are rare, implicit semiotic
analyses dominate the contemporary legal-linguistic research. The
result of it is that such research is semiotically underdeveloped, as it
provides material sources that have a strong semiotic potential, yet this
potential remains underexplored in them. In this sense, every article
about legal matters that belongs to legal doctrine is implicitly semiotic
by the very nature of the phenomenon law that is composed of linguistic
signs. Yet only the application of semiotic methods turns such research
into truly semiotic exploration. Likewise, language as a set of signs is
by necessity a construct that depends on semiotic operations. Therefore,
linguistics is a semiotic discipline par excellence. Likewise, legal
semiotics is preliminary to all legal-linguistic research. It is the
propaedeutic of legal linguistics. In addition, it covers visible aspects of
law or legal matters that often remain outside the mainstream interests
in legal-linguistic studies.
Legal linguistics and legal logic
Language as a linguistic concept is rooted in logic. Logical and
linguistic analyses are by the nature of things closely interrelated.
Therefore, it seems natural to inquire into the logic of the legal
language. Legal theoreticians were interested in this issue because they
assumed that the act of the application of law could be described as a
syllogism that is a logical figure representing reasoning (cf. Kalinowski
1964). Today, we know that syllogistic reasoning does not correspond
to the linguistic and logical reality of decision-making processes in the
area of law. Enthymeme, known since Aristotle, is better suited to
describe the activity of judges. Legal linguists ask how logical relations
and constructs are reflected in the legal language. Further aspects of
logical implications in the legal language concern deontic modality

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
35
because the legal language is expressed in statutes in the logical form
of a norm. Normativity has a specific modality in the legal language
that starts with the legal shall or the legal may and covers numerous
verbs and related linguistic structures which are used to express the
deontic modality in law.
15
Meanwhile, legal language as a set of signs
is dominated by linguistic conventions. It seems therefore that the
scrutiny of legal-linguistic conventions that due to the specifics of the
legal discourse are ideology-bound may render results that describe the
nature of law more fully than the logical analysis of the legal language,
which, doubtless, remains a valuable contribution to the clarification of
its deep structure.
Logic also contributed another standing topic to legal-linguistic
studies. A heritage of the multidisciplinary law and language studies is
the analysis of the relation between legal terms and legal concepts.
Jurists are interested in concepts because the legal doctrine is practiced
since the time of the ancient Romans as conceptual creation and
conceptual analysis. Linguists primarily deal with terms as terms
directly reflect linguistic reality. In legal linguistics, the reflection upon
the relation between legal concepts and legal terms was initiated and
developed in the writings by Heikki E.S. Mattila (2012b; 2018). Mattila
(2018: 130) defined the legal term as the linguistic expression of a legal
concept. Later, research into polysemy and synonymy in the legal
15
Research concerning this issue is impressive in legal linguistics. For instance, the
legal shall and the legal may were scrutinized thoroughly in legal-linguistic studies. The
problem concerns the specific use of shall and may in English legal texts, e.g. Art. 512
of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act: “A service provider shall not be liable
for monetary relief…” (shall in this sample does not introduce the future tense but
stresses that the service provider is not liable according to the law), or: “All rights
reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without written
permission of the publishers.” In this linguistic sample, the legal may marks action
prohibited by law and not an option (cf. Galdia 2017: 162-163). Some words, for
instance verbs, which have the undeniable potential to transfer the deontic modality
easily, e.g. Polish pozwala się (i.e. it is allowed), are not used for this purpose (cf.
Joanna Nowak-Michalska. 2012. Modalność deontyczna w języku prawnym na
przykładzie polskiego i hiszpańskiego kodeksu cywilnego. Poznań: Rys. Åke Frändberg
(2001. Rättsordningen och rättstillämpningen, in Svensk rätt – en översikt. ed.
Strömholm, S., 7-26. Uppsala: Justus) analysed the Swedish modal verbs få, böra, and
skola in Swedish legal provisions. Deontic modality in legal texts is conventional and
may be expressed with different linguistic means. Overall, legal linguistics is an
aggregate of such detailed studies of singular problems and of broader conceptual
constructs that structure the whole legal-linguistic domain in a paradigmatically more
explicit way. Specific and general studies constitute the legal-linguistic research. They
are interrelated like the two sides of the same coin.

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
36
language was connected to this definition. Today, these issues might be
better elucidated in pragmatic approaches to the legal language where
they appear in a different light.
Law and literature
Law appears primarily in texts. It shares this property with literature. I
perceive the scrutiny of law in literature as part of legal linguistics.
Some other researchers may see it as an independent area of knowledge
that they call law and literature. In essence, the difference in
perspective is rather of academic nature as no binding conclusions for
legal-linguistic research follow from the alleged dichotomy or from the
unity hypothesis. Abundant literature exists about the relation between
law and literature, law in literature and the like.
16
It shows that
describing and researching law in non-legal contexts is particularly
valuable as this research uncovers the underexplored potentialities of
law. Thus, it makes clearer the structure of legal communication that
today is limited to the research of explicitly legal texts, with exception
of media discourse studies. Legal texts, like literary texts appear in pre-
defined text types.
17
There is no spontaneous legal text type as there is
no spontaneous form in literary works. Statutory texts, court opinions
and even witness testimonies follow patterns predefined institutionally
by courts or by citizenry at large. Legal linguists study these texts types
16
Cf. Richard Weisberg. 1992. Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature.
New York: Columbia University Press; Marta Andruszkiewicz. 2021. The Heritage of
Cultural Determinants of Law and Literature: Methodological Findings, International
Journal for the Semiotics of Law 34: 611-621; Jeanne Gaakeer. 2012. On the Study
Methods of Our Time: Methodologies of Law and Literature, in Intersections of Law
and Culture, Gisler, B., Borella, S.S., Wiedmer, C. (eds.). 133-149. UK: Palgrave
Macmillan; Julia A. Shaw. 2011. The Continuing Relevance of Ars Poetica to Legal
Scholarship and Modern Lawyer, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law vol.
25/1, 71-93. In my own writings, chapters on law and literature as part of legal-linguistic
studies can be found in Galdia (2014: 265-340) and Galdia (2017: 303-314).
17
Cf. Jan M. Broekman, 1984. Text als Institution, in Rechtstheorie, Supplement 6,
Recht als Sinn und Institution, 145-167; Christer Laurén. 2002. Iconism and Special
Language, in The Development of Legal Language. Mattila, H.E.S. (ed.), 11-20.
Helsinki: Kauppakaari; Gotti, Maurizio. 2012. Text and Genre, in The Oxford
Handbook of Language and Law. Tiersma P.M., Solan L.M. (eds.), 53-66. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
37
(cf. Lindroos 2015) in an area that I call legal textology. Legal textology
is today not uniform and several typologies of legal texts were proposed
to date.
18
Contemporary legal textology goes over into legal discourse
analysis that integrates the discussed issues within a broader frame of
reference that enables deeper insights.
Linguistic turn in law
The initial interest in legal-linguistic matters that was mentioned above
was captured in different, interrelated approaches such as those
described. It also gave rise to a more structured apprehension of the
legal language. In turn, the scrutiny of the legal langue provoked a
closer interest in law itself. Previously, the analysed law manifested
itself mainly in form of the legal doctrine. In the legal doctrine, law was
systematized under all but linguistic points of view, although law is
primarily a linguistic phenomenon. As in many other areas of
knowledge the linguistic turn, i.e. the scrutiny of the object of study in
a scientific discipline from the perspective of its language was
perceived as promising and finally also brought encouraging results, the
same procedure was proposed to take place in legal sciences. The main
task of this methodical operation can be called the linguistic turn in law.
Until now, the legal doctrine viewed the law in a petrified form, as a set
of concepts expressed in provisions where their encoded meaning had
to be decoded. The biggest achievement of the attempt to implement
the linguistic turn in law was the finding that law is not decoded from
the legal provisions but created in numerous legal-linguistic operations
(cf. Galdia 2017: 240-270).
18
We may distinguish: the legislative language (statutes), legal decisions including fact
description, legal-doctrinal texts, language used by jurists in professional discussions
about law and in formal pleadings, language used by laypersons in legal contexts
(witness testimony, comments on legal matters), and texts produced by administrative
agencies (cf. Galdia 2017: 112). This area necessitates further detailed research as it
may be assumed that the origin or circumstances of the use of language might not be
the best criterion for distinguishing legal text types. For instance, administrative clerks
may express themselves clumsily, while witnesses may use a particularly precise and
elaborate language that includes legal terminology. Media language in reports about
trials is particularly multifaceted, depending on the specifics of the publication organ
and professional skills of journalists.

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
38
Law, which was approached in legal linguistics by linguists
interested them also as an object that could widen their linguistic
horizons. Yet, law proved to be an ungrateful object in terms of
profitability for linguistics. It appeared to linguists initially as a
language for special purposes, yet which area of knowledge did not
develop any special terminology to speak about its object? Only in
comparative legal-linguistic studies has the legal language proven
somewhat special as no legal language is universal. Additionally, many
legal languages are terminologically largely asymmetric. Another
finding, this time maybe more spectacular yet also less influential, was
the discovery of the ordinary language dimension in the legal language.
In fact, legal language can be described today as a language for special
purposes with its own terminology and its specific text types. Yet there
is no intrinsic necessity in the legal language forcing it to continue this
path. Legal communication could also take place in ordinary language,
provided the existing legal concepts would be duly transformed and
appropriate text types would be proposed to enable this type of
communication. Linguists learned a bitter lesson from their scrutiny of
the legal language. The initial mystery of legal constructs that
fascinated them turned into a mass of obscure, often purposefully
misleading statements about the exercise of power in society. No
profound well of semantic creation was discovered in it but a shallow
pond of capriciously tailored concepts that simply meant something else
than words mean in our ordinary speech. Law that was expressed with
the means of the legal doctrine simplified our world ruthlessly while
decorating the brutal fight for power in society with scholarly erudition.
The appropriate reaction to this discovery is not disillusion with the
object of legal-linguistic studies but the adjustment of perspective upon
the studied object. In fact, methodology comes first in every emerging
and expanding discipline, and especially in legal linguistics. The task
of legal-linguistic methodology is to provide guidelines in situations
such as the one described in this paragraph. I will therefore address now
some aspects of the legal-linguistic method.

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
39
Legal-linguistic methodology
The above sketched aspects of legal-semiotic and legal-logical
approaches that are suitable to support the linguistic turn in law further
facilitated the emergence of a more consolidated legal-linguistic
method. In order to conduct systematic research into the legal language
the legal linguist needs a method that responds to his epistemic interests
and steers the steps he undertakes when trying to elucidate the legal
language. However, legal linguistics cannot refer to a set of methodical
rules like established sciences, for instance chemistry. Its method
emerges in the doing of the legal-linguistic research towards the
background of knowledge assimilated in areas that were described in
above paragraphs. Therefore, the research into the legal language can
be done in many ways. Particularly challenging for legal linguistics is
the identification of methods apt at serving its purpose. As mentioned
above, two disciplines deal already with the method for the studies of
the language of law. First, interdisciplinary law and language studies
use in the discussion of their topics the methods of the involved
disciplines, i.e. of law or of linguistics. Forensic linguistics, a sister
discipline of legal linguistics, prefers purely linguistic methods. Legal
linguistics sets up a method that combines methodical approaches to
language and to law in order to elucidate legal problems from its
specific point of view. Therefore, it differs from the named areas of
knowledge, although it does not necessarily contradict their approaches
and results. It is rather methodically complementary, yet also
paradigmatically more explicit as it defines more coherently its goals
and methods. It also reaches beyond the limits of interdisciplinary
approaches and beyond the range of issues discussed in forensic
linguistics that is often determined by immediate needs of judicial
institutions. It this sense, at least, legal linguistics is an innovation that
should broaden and deepen our knowledge of law and of language.
Preliminaries of the legal-linguistic method include numerous
choices. Researchers of the legal language will have to determine which
concept of language they perceive as best suiting their epistemic
interests. Furthermore, they need to determine the concept of law that
underlies their studies. Such choices became necessary as neither
linguistics nor legal sciences, and especially legal theory, offer us a
uniform method. Legal-linguistic studies that neglect preliminary
conceptual choices will not be convincing and will not further the goals

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
40
of legal linguistics. Next, the incorporation of the legal component into
the legal-linguistic method that I call juridicity will have to take place.
Juridicity (one could also call it legalness) comprises all legally relevant
aspects of the language of law, mainly its regulation and its treatment
in the legal doctrine. Furthermore, the legal-linguistic approach differs
from legal approaches that focus mainly upon the legal regulation. For
instance, in case of a change in the penal code of a country that
abolishes the capital punishment in that country and replaces it with
lifelong imprisonment, the change provoked by the amendment will be
fundamental in the criminal law doctrine of the concerned country.
Meanwhile, for the legal linguist this change may appear insignificant
because the language of the law scarcely changes even if the
amendment might manifest itself as a part of the legal discourse about
law. This discourse may be quite insignificant as well. By contrast, the
linguistic modernization of a civil code that does not change the
regulation in it, may become a turning point in the development of the
legal language of a country.
19
Therefore, central legal documents such
as codes may occasionally be less important in the legal-linguistic
research than certain statutes of minor practical importance that reveal
legal-linguistically relevant phenomena. Furthermore, the question of
legal validity of an analysed legal provision or a court decision is less
significant for the legal linguist who searches in the linguistic samples
the language of the law. For him, the issue whether a statute is still
applicable or whether a court decision was quashed on appeal is
secondary to the dominating issue whether it as a linguistic sample that,
when researched, reveals a relevant aspect of the legal language. The
above sketch of the legal-linguistic methodical fundamentals enables a
more coherent view upon the legal language.
19
One might think here about the recent amendments to the French civil code that
mainly envisaged its linguistic, and not doctrinal, modernization. In this case, also the
legislative efforts to modernize the language of the code proved largely insignificant
(cf. Laurent Leveneur (ed.). 2016. Dossier spécial. Code civil. Projet de réforme du
droit des contracts, du régime général et de la preuve des obligations. Paris:
LexisNexis).

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
41
Legal language
Legal linguistics does not only research itself, i.e. its methodological
fundamentals. Primarily, it is expected to research the legal language.
Yet, as so often, the object of legal-linguistic studies depends on the
methodological determination in the approach adapted by the
researcher. The easiest way to determine it is the one by exclusion.
Legal linguists generally agree that legal language is different from any
natural language because its ontology is of a different sort. It is a
language for special purposes, and it is used primarily in social
institutions that deal with the creation and the application of law.
Meanwhile, its structural background is the ordinary language. Any
information expressed in the legal language could also be
communicated in ordinary language, as the ordinary language is the
basis of our communication. Yet, this is rarely the case in legal
institutions. Therefore, today, legal language in its classical shape can
be researched as a language for special purposes. Its future nature is
open, as tendencies to express socially relevant contents in ordinary
language gain momentum in many societies. Particularly interesting in
this context is the dynamic zone of status interchange between legal
language and ordinary language. On the one side, words of ordinary
language acquire new, specific meaning in the legal language (cf.
property vs. possession, good faith, free movement of people), on the
other side, the specific terminology of the legal language infiltrates
ordinary language (cf. presumption of innocence). What is more, the
legal language is rooted regularly in another legal language, for instance
the terminology of the legal French is based on legal Latin (cf. Mattila
2018: 114). Likewise, the written and the spoken varieties of the legal
language influence each other, this time in analogy with spoken and
written ordinary language. Meanwhile, the legal language become truly
fascinating when it is researched as a tool that accomplishes the
emergence of social reality. Indeed, legal language is constitutive of law
as legal communication is primarily verbal communication. Unlike the
daily communication that occasionally can be efficient in multiple
forms of non-verbal action such as gestures, drawings, and
mathematical formulae, our law becomes effective exclusively in verbal
communication. What is more, in sociolinguistic terms, the legal
language belongs to the elaborate code as the professional legal
language demands rather advanced linguistic skills. Also, the non-

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
42
professional use of language in the area of law is related to this elaborate
code, be it only indirectly. To illustrate, the witness may use ordinary
language during his testimony, yet his speech will reflect the
professional language of jurists, for instance in (often failed) attempts
to speak like them. Legal language is an institutionalized practice and
non-jurists are aware of this fact. This finding explains their attempts to
adapt their non-professional language to the speech they experience in
legal institutions. However, restricted codes, vulgar and grammatically
incorrect language may also transfer legal messages correctly.
20
Meanwhile, the relation between legal communication in
grammatically correct and incorrect language remains unexplored in
legal linguistics. What is more, the linguistic nature of law does not
contradict views developed in social sciences that law is a mechanism
of the exercise of power in society. Doubtless, law is not a matter of
mere words, but of words used to steer human action in a compulsory
way. This ontological feature of law was introduced into legal
linguistics by social scientists, as jurists and legal linguists who stand
in the tradition of legal positivism or classical structuralism rather
avoided this topic and perceived it apparently as being out of scope in
legal-linguistic studies.
21
Meanwhile, more contemporary legal-
linguistic studies, especially those reflecting the method of critical
discourse analysis, incorporate elements of the exercise of power in
society into the analysis of the legal language. They show that the
mechanism of power exercise is an intrinsic structural element of the
language of law. Many legal-linguistic studies do not incorporate this
20
Cf. the series of humorous sketches on the public Swedish television SVT, Suleyman
advokat, performed in a Swedish language spoken by immigrants, which only
rudimentarily reflects the rules of the Swedish grammar (even the word advokat is
spelled adventurously advokatt in the title of the series). The content of the Swedish
law is rendered in the short films, which constitute the series, very correctly and
comprehensibly, notwithstanding the approximate and whimsical Swedish used for the
explanation of legal issues. The short films clearly ridicule this sort of language, yet
they also teach a lesson about legal semantics.
21
Jean-Louis Sourioux and Pierre Lerat (1975) stressed the political character of legal
terminology, i.e. its dependence on the state ideology. Jaakko Husa (2007) mentioned
in his Kreikan oikeus ja oikeuskieli the intrinsically political element in law that is the
exercise of power with linguistic means. Heikki E.S. Mattila (2018: 117) stressed that
the legal language serves the purpose of the realization of power. In Mattila’s view, this
feature of the legal language might be perceived as a specific function of the legal
language. Systematic legal-linguistic studies of the exercise of power in law with the
help of language may be based upon the concept of power worked out by Michel
Foucault (cf. Galdia 2014).

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
43
finding into their methods and remain therefore less explicative in their
final results.
Monolingual and comparative legal linguistics
Next to affirmative and critical legal-linguistic studies, legal linguistics
is represented in two other types of research. Some researchers engage
in the scrutiny of one legal language, others adopt the comparative
perspective upon the legal language. Both perspectives upon the legal
language brought valuable results (cf. Galdia 2020). The American
legal-linguistic tradition whose most prominent representatives were
David Mellinkoff (1963) and Peter M. Tiersma (1999) initiated in many
parts of the world original legal-linguistic inquiries concerning other
languages, although it mainly focused upon legal English, especially
upon the problems of the comprehensibility of the legal English towards
the background of its historical development. The French pioneers of
legal-linguistic studies, Gérard Cornu (2005) as well as Pierre Lerat and
Jean-Louis Sourioux (1975) dealt exclusively with legal French.
Meanwhile, many of their general findings concern also the legal
language as such, and not only the legal French. A group of Russian
scholars under A.S. Pigolkin (1990) dealt with the fundamentals of the
Russian legal language. Their findings permeate even this essay, in
which the Russian legal language is otherwise not mentioned. In
Poland, Maria Teresa Lizisowa (2016) developed her communicational
theory of law in exclusive reference to legal Polish. Her theory could
be also stated in general terms, independently of the legal Polish
language. Finally, Deborah Cao (2004) authored a pioneering analysis
of legal Chinese, which in its results reaches beyond the main scope of
her study. Meanwhile, in a new attempt to broaden the horizon of legal-
linguistic studies, Heikki E.S. Mattila (2012a; 2013) shaped the
comparative legal linguistics in that he combined the methodology of
comparative law with comparative linguistics (cf. Lundmark 2012: 51).
In the background of all these efforts there is the thesis about the
ubiquitous character of the legal language. Therefore, it appears
particularly urgent to explore the assumptions of the ubiquity thesis.
First, it is assumed in it that the legal language is present in every natural
language. Second, it is assumed that the level of professionalism in the

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
44
legal language may differ, i.e. that one legal language may be more
professional or abstract than other legal languages on the scale between
doctrinally petrified language on the one side and ordinary language on
the other side. Third, it is assumed that the communicative tasks are
equal in all legal languages. Comparative legal-linguistic research
indicates that the ubiquity thesis is a correct epistemic assumption.
Monolingual legal-linguistic research did not provide any results that
might contradict the main assumptions of the ubiquity thesis. The
ubiquity thesis is central to all attempts to generalize legal-linguistic
findings. Furthermore, in terms of method, research into a specific legal
language may appear easier than a comparative study. Meanwhile, there
is no general method of description for all legal languages as their
description depends also on some characteristic features or
developments that concern the described language. For instance, in the
description of the legal Greek, the historical controversy about the use
of καθαρεύουσα (katharevusa) or δημοτική (dimotiki) deserves special
attention of researchers, while there is no such problem in the
description of the legal Polish (cf. Galdia 2021). Therefore, a uniform
approach to the description of singular legal languages may prove
counterproductive and sterile. In comparative linguistics, descriptive
approaches are generalized, yet their application comes at a price. This
methodological intricacy might also be the reason why some singular
legal languages such as legal English or legal Chinese were researched
both in the monolingual and in the comparative perspectives. In fact,
most great legal languages have been researched in both perspectives
and both research perspectives have contributed valuable results. I will
now treat some of these results in more detail limiting my efforts to the
mainstream current of legal linguistics.
Mainstream legal linguistics, its results and limits
I call mainstream legal linguistics the dominating current in legal-
linguistic studies that constitutes the subject of teaching and the object
for further research in academic institutions. Mainstream knowledge is
beneficial as it forms the basis for professionalism in every area of
studies. However, its most unpleasant feature is that it has the tendency
to suppress criticism on established knowledge. By so doing, it prevents

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
45
the emergence of alternative intellectual currents that reshape the
existing knowledge and propose paradigmatic changes in an area of
knowledge. The matter is not a legal-linguistic particularity, yet a
scientific regularity and it is mentioned here as such and not as a
criticism on the existing currents in the mainstream legal linguistics,
mainly because such criticism might be premature. Today, the contours
of legal-linguistic methods and topics are clearer than ever. Yet, too
many fundamental legal-linguistic issues remain open (cf. Engberg,
Kjaer 2011). Is it possible to answer today the question whether there
is bad or useless legal linguistics? Are some conceptions of legal
linguistics better than others? I would answer in the affirmative, yet also
this answer might be perceived as premature in the light of
developments in our appreciation of the legal language. At least, I
assume that the better an approach to the legal language allows us the
apprehend the totality of our speech about law, the higher is its
usefulness and also its standing among the existing legal-linguistic
approaches. I perceive this finding as a conclusive remark on the
relation between mainstream legal-linguistic and alternative approaches
to the legal language. Meanwhile, on the more positive side, what did
legal linguists find out? What can they profess today as established
knowledge about the legal language? First, legal linguistics arrived at
the determination of the legal language and its characteristic features
that reaches beyond daily experience of professional and non-
professional speakers of the legal language. We may count among
them: precision, informational overload, obscurity, schematized
language, formal vocabulary, archaism and solemnity, arcane language,
redundant terms, and abbreviations (cf. Galdia 2017: 135-142). Heikki
E.S. Mattila (2018: 122-127) perceived as characteristic of the language
of law: the frequency of definitions, tautology, information density,
abstraction, hypothetical nature (i.e. the timelessness of law that
regulates also future factual constellations), neutrality, frequency of
references, organized text structure and formalism, frequency of
abbreviations, and sentence complexity. Today, all these characteristic
features of the legal language may be exposed to further critical
scrutiny. First of all, it seems expedient to distinguish between the ideal
language of law defined by jurists where precision and timelessness
should reign and the reality of the use of language in the area of law
where ambiguity, vagueness, and underdetermination of meaning are
omnipresent (cf. Poscher 2012: 128-144). In most legal-linguistic
studies, the legal language is determined between this dichotomy of

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
46
ideal and reality. It is important to take this dichotomy seriously in all
attempts to understand the characteristic features of the legal language.
Furthermore, issues of comprehensibility and legal semantics,
including lexicology and lexicography were the most general concepts
that inspired individual legal-linguistic research from the inception
stage of legal-linguistic studies. Problems of comprehensibility of legal
texts, which were analysed systematically in the American tradition of
legal linguistics, initiated the plain language movement. Projects
aiming at the increase of understandability of legal text that were
developed within this movement undeniably brought some encouraging
results. From the theoretical point of view, it is necessary to mention
that the unclarified concept of the plain language that is a language
without speakers still causes problems in legal linguistics (cf. Galdia
2017: 296-298). Furthermore, legal lexicology stressed the polysemy
and the synonymy in the language of law. Additionally, within the
lexicological research into great legal languages, pluricentric legal
terminology gained momentum. It was noted that English, Chinese,
French, German, Swedish and other legal languages dispose of
different, sometimes incongruent terms due to differences among legal
systems expressed in these languages.
22
Furthermore, legal etymology,
especially the link between legal languages and legal Latin as well as
historical developments in the most influential legal languages are well
known today (cf. Mattila 2013). Overall, the best-known characteristic
features of the legal language are today those connected to processes in
which legal language developed as a language for specific purposes, i.e.
in contradistinction to ordinary language. Particularly thoroughly
scrutinized remains legal terminology that forms the focal point for
legal-linguistic explorations of many researchers.
22
Cf. for legal English Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski. 2011. Patterns in Linguistic
Variation in American Legal English. A Corpus-Based Study. Frankfurt a.M.: P. Lang;
for legal German Marcus Galdia. 1998. Lakisaksa, in Encyclopaedia Iuridica Fennica,
vol. VI, Kansainväliset suhteet, 550-555. Helsinki: Suomalainen Lakimiesyhdistys;
Artur Dariusz Kubacki. 2014. Pluricentryzm w niemieckim języku standardowym
i specjalistycznym, Comparative Legilinguistics vol. 17, 163-181. For legal Chinese in
Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan cf. Ho-yan Chan. 两岸三地 (Liang An San
Di), vol. 1/2014, vol. 2/2015, vol. 3/2017, Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong
Press.

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
47
Newer conceptualizations in legal linguistics
The scrutiny of the language of law in statutory acts and in court
opinions brought results that can be evaluated in the positive and in the
negative perspective. Positively, we may mention the discovery of
several dimensions of the legal language.
23
Most important among them
are the terminological, the textological, and the discursive dimension.
Negatively, legal-linguistic studies made plain that the focus upon the
language of legal institutions did not cover the totality of our speaking
about law, as many other speakers beyond these institutions speak about
law. Their speech might not represent law in terms defined
institutionally in democratic states, yet it together with the speech in
judicial institutions represents the totality of our speech about law.
23
In many materials, legal language manifests itself strongly, so to say for all to see. In
footnote 1 such a typical legal-linguistic case and its outer boundaries were mentioned.
As a rule, it concerns the application of a legal statute or a court holding to a factual
case, for instance the legal question whether legal proceedings took place ‘within a
reasonable time’ (cf. ECHR judgment 497/17 of 20 June 2020, Chiarello v. Germany).
In this court opinion, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) had to decide
whether criminal proceedings against the defendant that lasted eight years and five
months violated his rights under Art. VI of the European Convention on Human Rights
(EHRC). This article says: “In the determination of his civil rights and obligations or of
any criminal charge against him, everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within
a reasonable time.” Art. VI does not further determine the formulation ‘within a
reasonable time’. Judges need to decide the question when applying the provision of
the EHRC to the case. This is the standard legal-linguistic situation that is dealt with in
mainstream legal-linguistic studies. More challenging is another question that the
ECHR had to decide in the same procedure, namely the issue whether possible damages
that the defendant might have suffered were compensated by the fact that in the initial
trial a five month segment of the sentence was declared by the court enforced in advance
due to the overlong procedure to which the defendant was exposed. This question might
be perceived as a purely legal issue. A corresponding legal-factual constellation
concerns the question whether a legal intern may be prohibited from wearing a
headscarf as a religious symbol when representing the government in a trial (cf. German
Constitutional Court’s order of 14 January 2020, 2 BvR 1333/17). The prohibition
might violate the trainee’s constitutional right to exercise her religion freely. In previous
approaches to the legal language such issues were neglected as non-linguistic and
purely legal. In more contemporary approaches, court decisions concerning such
questions are perceived as strictly legal-linguistic as they concern the discursive
determination of meaning in law, and not only the clarification of an ambiguous word
or formulation in the statutory language. Discursive approaches to legal language
enable us to understand law more fully. Paradigmatically, the shift from the analysis of
isolated or contextually fixed vocabulary of law to explicit discourse analysis is the
fundamental step that constitutes modern legal linguistics.

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
48
Traditional legal linguistics neglected this moment while approaching
and analysing the language of law. Methodically, it defined the
language of law too narrowly and therefore failed in the attempt to
describe it convincingly. Today, the language of non-professionals
speaking about law, the language of the media reporting legal matters,
the language of non-professionals in legally defined contexts, for
instance in trials, etc. are scrutinized in order to render more fully the
discourse about law. Furthermore, the discourse about the valid law is
antagonistic, and it regularly takes place in hostile communicative
landscapes. Traditional legal linguistics underestimated this problem as
well and subscribed to a fiction where all involved parties aimed with
rational argumentative means to reach a just solution to a legal problem.
In terms of the legal-linguistic methodology supported in this essay, the
traditional legal linguistics underestimated the element of juridicity
(legalness) in the linguistic material that it is expected to analyse.
Another weakness of the traditional legal linguistics was the approach
to law without taking into consideration the element of power in it. In
the past, law was regularly analysed in a splendid isolation from one of
its fundamental elements, i.e. the exercise of power in society. Even
today, many researchers continue to write in this vein. Judicial
institutions have the tendency to minimize this aspect and they tend to
stress the mechanical application of law as their professional
responsibility. This argumentative constant goes back to legal
positivism that imagined the judge as a professional who applies
internalized legal knowledge to legal problems in the matters he had to
decide. His role was defined as decoding of the encoded messages in
statutory law and in legal decisions of other courts. According to this
view, the better the judge knew the law, the easier it was for him to
decode the encoded meaning in statutory provisions correctly and to
apply it strictly, i.e. mechanically to the case he had to decide.
Meanwhile, already the general legal theory signaled that the
application of law is a creative act where argumentation and
interpretation decide about the legal meaning within different ethical
frames of reference, thus engendering differing, and often also

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
49
contradictory decisions.
24
Theoreticians of law discovered that there
was no one right decision in law (cf. Aarnio 1987; Dworkin 1991).
Traditional legal linguistics did not take this discovery seriously. Time
has come to widen the scope of legal-linguistic studies methodically
and materially. Pragmatic legal linguistics emerged as an answer to the
deficiencies described in this paragraph. Therefore, in the follow up to
this review essay I will deal with pragmatic legal linguistics.
24
In the decision Olympic Airways v. Hussain (540 U.S. 644, 2004) the U.S. Supreme
Court had to decide whether an airline was liable for wrongful death of a passenger who
died on board after being refused by a flight attendant to change his seat and move to a
place where cigarette smoke penetrated less invasively. The passenger suffered of
asthma and booked a seat in the non-smoking section of the plane (in times when
smoking was still allowed on international flights). Yet, too much smoke invaded the
non-smoking section and the passenger got respiratory problems. He got support from
a medical doctor but died sometime later. His widow referred in her suit to Article 17
of the Warsaw Convention and demanded damages from the airline. Article 17 of the
Warsaw Convention says: “The carrier is liable for damage sustained in the event of the
death or wounding of a passenger or any other bodily injury suffered by a passenger, if
the accident which caused the damage so sustained took place on board the aircraft or
in the course of any of the operations of embarking or disembarking.” It is problematic
whether an accident happened on board the aircraft in our case. The airline says no, as
nothing extraordinary happened on board, the widow says yes, as the passenger was not
allowed to take another seat and died because of this refusal. The court refers for
orientation to a definition of accident from a precedent (Air France v. Saks, 470 U.S.
392, 1985), saying that an accident is “an unexpected or unusual event or happening
that is external to the passenger.” Meanwhile, the decision of the court finally follows
the policy established to further certain social goals. In fact, there is no one right
solution to such cases, notwithstanding their meticulous linguistic analysis. We have
here to do with a decision that will convince some jurists and non-professionals of law
more than the contrary decision, as at least two well founded solutions are thinkable in
this case. In other words, none of the two thinkable decisions appears irrational.
Reasonableness of the final decision of the U.S. Supreme Court is rooted in the
rationality established along ideological lines. Research into legal argumentation seems
to be fundamental to the legal-linguistic analysis of this case, cf. Aarnio, Aulis. 1989.
Das regulative Prinzip der Gesetzesauslegung. Überlegungen zum Problem der
Möglichkeit der einzig richtigen Entscheidung, Rechtstheorie vol. 20, 409-431. Legal
linguistics has to develop methods that would be able to cope with legal arguments
developed along the lines of legal rationality because the legal language functions as a
vehicle of legal rationality.

Marcus Galdia: Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics
50
Friends and foes of legal linguistics
Legal linguistics is an area of professional activities. Meanwhile, it is
rarely exercised by scholars who deal exclusively with legal-linguistic
issues. The reason for this situation is the lack of institutional support
for legal linguists. Paradoxically, as a part of the social segment of
society that is committed to progress, the established academia did not
always welcome the newly emerged area of legal-linguistic studies. It
is a structural constant in the scientific exploration of nature and society
that progress and innovation are not generally welcome, yet as a rule
they cannot be prevented either. Progressive and regressive forces in
the academic discourse and in academic institutions, paradigmatic
continuity and discontinuity, as well as methodological twists and tilts
shape the reality of intellectual exploration of man in the world.
Therefore, it might have been vain to expect general enthusiasm in the
moment of emergence of legal linguistics from the amalgam of legal
and linguistic issues and methods. Today, legal linguistics is slightly
better positioned on the scale of academic disciplines. Yet, it remains
rather marginal in legal studies and in linguistics proper, although it
emerged with the ambitious aim to restructure our perspective upon law
through researching its language. In legal sciences, its existence is
sometimes ignored, and the number of academic positions devoted to
the study of legal language is minimal when compared for instance with
the number of tenures in legal history or in property law. Finally, while
the legal-linguistic research brought up a vast amount of valuable
results, these results are at best contemplated in isolation and have no
impact upon the teaching and the researching of law in law schools.
Strategically, legal linguistics of the future will have to balance this
structural deficiency.
Conclusions
Scholarly interest in matters related to legal language shaped a new area
of knowledge called in this essay legal linguistics. Unsystematic
knowledge about legal language has longer roots and reaches back to
antiquity. Meanwhile, precisely formulated research programmes and

Comparative Legilinguistics 47/2021
51
studies of the legal language emerged relatively late, only in the course
of the twentieth century. They resulted in the accumulation of
knowledge that enables today to teach and to research legal language
systematically. Legal-linguistic research that initially concerned some
selected topics that were deemed as characteristic features of the legal
language expanded into an area of knowledge covering today all
socially relevant aspects of language use in law. Paradigmatically, the
shift from analysing legal vocabulary to discourse analysis enabled the
emergence of modern legal linguistics. This modern legal linguistics
expanded its domain of research to cover all linguistically relevant
operations in law. Therefore, it almost coincides with law and with legal
studies. It could be also called a specific theory of law. From the legal-
linguistic perspective, legal linguistics features the most relevant theory
of law, i.e. the theory of the legal language. It enables description and
understanding of law in broadest social contexts. It would be difficult
to demand more from an area of knowledge.
References
In the references, only publications concerning general aspects of legal
linguistics are listed. Literature concerning specific legal-linguistic
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Andruszkiewicz, Marta. 2016. On Some of the Aspects of the Linguistic
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Dworkin, Ronald. 1991. Law’s Empire. London: Fontana Press.
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Galdia, Marcus. 2020. The Comparative Element in Comparative Legal
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Galdia, Marcus. 2021. Legal Constructs. Reflections upon Legal-
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Husa, Jaakko. 2015. A New Introduction to Comparative Law.
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Husa, Jaakko. 2020. Language of Law and Invasive Legal Species –
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