A Discursive Approach to Legal Texts: Court Judgments as an Example

Whether in legal practice or jurisprudence, court judgments or case briefs are one of the most important legal genres for the legal profession. In the Common Law system, precedents constitute an essential basis in legal argument. In China, with the country’s accession to the WTO, the transparency principles necessitate the study of the court judgments.With the economic globalization and the increasing interaction of legal affairs between countries, the paper examines contrastively the linguistic characteristics, moves and rhetoric of Chinese and American court judgments, with the aim of specifying the rhetorical preferences that are characteristic of “standard” judgments. The more significant point is that analysis of legal cultures is employed to account for the discursive differences. This study also has an underlying pedagogical motivation in that the results would be of great value and interest to the Chinese students of English for Legal Purposes (ELP) and the lawyers practicing foreign legal affairs.