Spanish and Law – Interdisciplinary Insights (original) (raw)

The book consists of articles presented at the IV CERLIS (Research Centre on Languages for Specific Purposes) International Conference at the University of Bergamo (Italy) held on 19-21 June 2009 and titled Researching Language and the Law: Intercultural Perspectives. As stated in the introduction to the book, it also includes articles of other specialists in this field. The book consists of eleven articles presenting the results of research in the field of language and law focused on Spanish, sometimes in comparison with Italian, as is the case of the articles by Carpi, Mata Pastor and Valero Gisbert. The authors frequently base their observations on the analysis of text corpora. The method employed in many articles is discourse analysis. Some authors analyse various professional genres in legal context and one article is devoted to discursive markers. Legal translation is also dealt with. One article discusses the legal language of the European Union. All articles are written in Spanish. It would therefore be useful to provide English summaries of the articles to allow non-Spanish-speaking persons to grasp the main idea of the contributions. In the introduction the editors of the volume emphasize the central role of language in the theory of law, which is due to the fact that language is at the same time the object of the study and the means of carrying it out (p. 7). They agree with Palazzo (2003, 113) that the law is language because all legal norms and resolutions need a linguistic formulation to exist. They emphasize that there are various legal languages, each one with its own characteristics (p. 8). They refer to the division made by Jerzy Wróblewski (2000, 157-158), who distinguishes three types of languages related to law: legal language (in which all laws are formulated), language of the application of law (language of the judicial practice) and the language of legal science. Further on they apply this division to classify the articles presented in the book. They also deal with the relation between linguistic and legal norms, the recipients of legal norms and the simplicity versus complexity of legal language. Referring to Prieto de Pedro (1996, 118) they remark that both citizens and jurists are the recipients of legal texts. Therefore, the language used in legal texts should meet the needs of these both types of recipients: simplicity and clarity on one hand and precision and technical explicitness on another