Professional communication in the legal domain

The language of the law, which lawyers use to communicate in the legal domain, has a notorious reputation as a highly complex, overly technical register, accessible only to the initiated. This perception can be traced back over many centuries. For example, in the 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels, the writer Jonathon Swift refers to the community of legal practitioners and comments that ‘this Society hath a peculiar Cant and Jargon of their own, that no other Mortal can understand’ (Swift 1967: 297). Yet, in spite of such observations, it is through the language of the law that the everyday social lives of ordinary people are routinely regulated. The language of the law plays a central role in the legal process, from the construction of legal rules, to their enforcement by police and their interpretation in a court of law. It should be obvious, therefore, that professional communication in the legal domain goes far beyond professional encounters between specialist lawyers and includes a much wider range of interactions. For the purposes of this chapter, professional legal communication refers broadly to discourse practices in legal contexts: it includes the language of the law and the way this language is used by both specialists and non-specialists as they negotiate the legal process. Scholars interested in professional legal communication in this broad sense belong to a range of different scholarly traditions, including genre analysis, conversation analysis, forensic linguistics, semiotics, linguistic anthropology, jurisprudence, legal writing and drafting, law and society. They have focused on everything from the construction of written legal texts to spoken interactions in police interviews, lawyer-client interviews, legal proceedings, as well as intercultural interactions in multilingual and multicultural contexts which are often complicated by language barriers and call for the involvement of translators and interpreters.