🎉   Please check out our new website over at books-etc.com.

Seller
Your price
£34.48
RRP: £39.99
Save £5.51 (14%)
Printed on Demand
Dispatched within 7-9 working days.

Fiction and the Languages of Law

Understanding Contemporary Legal Discourse. Law, Language and Communication

By (author) Karen Petroski
Format: Paperback / softback
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd, London, United Kingdom
Imprint: Routledge
Published: 30th Jun 2020
Dimensions: w 174mm h 246mm
Weight: 440g
ISBN-10: 0367519887
ISBN-13: 9780367519889
Barcode No: 9780367519889
Trade or Institutional customer? Contact us about large order quotes.
Synopsis
Contemporary legal reasoning has more in common with fictional discourse than we tend to realize. Through an examination of the U.S. Supreme Court's written output during a recent landmark term, this book exposes many of the parallels between these two special kinds of language use. Focusing on linguistic and rhetorical patterns in the dozens of reasoned opinions issued by the Court between October 2014 and June 2015, the book takes nonlawyer readers on a lively tour of contemporary American legal reasoning and acquaints legal readers with some surprising features of their own thinking and writing habits. It analyzes cases addressing a huge variety of issues, ranging from the rights of drivers stopped by the police to the decision-making processes of the Environmental Protection Agency-as well as the term's best-known case, which recognized a constitutional right to marriage for same-sex as well as different-sex couples. Fiction and the Languages of Law reframes a number of long-running legal debates, identifies other related paradoxes within legal discourse, and traces them all to common sources: judges' and lawyers' habit of alternating unselfconsciously between two different attitudes toward the language they use, and a set of professional biases that tends to prevent scrutiny of that habit.

New & Used

Seller Information Condition Price
-New£34.48
+ FREE UK P & P

What Reviewers Are Saying

Be the first to review this item. Submit your review now