Between text, meaning and legal languages, edited by Jan Engberg, presents an eclectic collection of interdisciplinary research loosely gathered around the issues of interpretation, law, and language. In the introduction, Engberg highlights the opportunities that recent developments in legal linguistics provide for a better understanding of legal interpretation. The introductory chapter formulates the book's promise to expand the legal community's understanding of the mechanics of interpretation, which are currently seen as a ‘black box’. The rest of the volume is divided into three sections.
Chapters in Section 1, ‘Investigating legal interpretation and argumentation’, look into linguistic strategies used by participants in court procedures. Mathilde Barraband, Anne-Marie Duquette, & Julien Lefort-Favreau analyze the Dulac affair, a case involving conflicting interpretations of a controversial exhibition project by an art student, revealing diverging institutional interpretation frameworks and norms. Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski examines the rhetoric in Poland's Constitutional Tribunal ruling on abortion, scrutinizing the use of ‘value-laden’ emotive language in a politically charged decision. Giovanni Tuzet focuses on the pragmatics of evidence discourse, exploring the indexical nature of ostensive acts and their relation to arguments in juridical proof.
Section 2, ‘Looking at language to investigate legal challenges’, shifts the focus to the linguistic underpinnings of legal problems. Daniel Greineder discusses the challenges arising from the use of multiple registers of legal English in international commercial arbitration. Jacqueline Visconti's chapter reviews measures implemented by the Italian government to improve the clarity of legal documents. It introduces the ClearAct project, which analyzes the linguistic features of counsel proceedings texts collected in an anonymized database to promote effective writing. Jakub Marszalenko examines the complexities of Japanese-English court interpreting, particularly the difficulties posed by the mismatch in honorific systems between the two languages. Caroline Laske advocates for using corpus linguistics to achieve semantic objectivity in interpreting legal texts, exemplified by reading thirteenth-century normative texts from Normandy, Saxony, and Norway.
The final section, ‘Theories of sense and meaning for legal investigations’, turns to the philosophy of language and linguistic theory to solve problems of legal theory and practice. Weronika Dzięgielewska & Wojciech Rzepiński adapt Robert Brandom's pragmatist philosophy of meaning-use relationships to analyze the concept of practice as developed in legal theory. Mateusz Zeifert's chapter draws on Anna Wierzbicka's theory of natural semantic metalanguage to propose a framework for ‘culture-neutral’ legal definitions and translations.
Overall, the volume covers a dizzying breadth of topics and approaches. A uniting thread that draws the papers together appears to be the elusive goal of achieving objective legal interpretation. While this goal leads to multiple technical insights into legal communication, the volume treats the social and cultural aspects of interpretation as an obstacle to overcome rather than an inherent feature of human communication. This stance is highlighted by the fact that the authors largely ignore the extensive and well-established literature on law and language in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Ultimately, while the volume offers valuable insights into current topics in legal linguistics, it would benefit from engaging with the social life of language more thoroughly.
