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 LAW, LANGUAGE AND THE
COURTROOM
LEGAL LINGUISTICS AND THE DISCOURSE OF JUDGES
Edited by Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski and
Gianluca Pontrandolfo
Law, Language and the
Courtroom

This book explores the language of judges. It is concerned with understanding

how language works in judicial contexts. Using a range of disciplinary and
methodological perspectives, it looks in detail at the ways in which judicial discourse is
argued, constructed, interpreted and perceived. Focusing on four central themes -
constructing judicial discourse and judicial identities, judicial argumentation and
evaluative language, judicial interpretation, and clarity in judicial discourse -
the book’s ultimate goal is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of
current critical issues of the role of language in judicial settings. Contributors
include legal linguists, lawyers, legal scholars, legal practitioners, legal translators
and anthropologists, who explore patterns of linguistic organisation and use in
judicial institutions and analyse language as an instrument for understanding both
the judicial decision-making process and its outcome.
The book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in legal linguistics and
those specialising in judicial argumentation and reasoning, and forensic linguists
interested in the use of language in judicial settings.

Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski is Associate Professor and Head of the Department

of Specialised Languages and Intercultural Communication, University of
Lodz (Poland), where he has been teaching various seminars in specialised
communication and legal discourse analysis. His research focuses on functional
and corpus-based approaches to the study of judicial discourse in US and Polish
courts. He has published widely in the area of variation in legal language, legal
phraseology and communicating evaluative meanings in judicial opinions. He is
now involved in researching legal argumentation in the justification of judicial
decisions.

Gianluca Pontrandolfo holds a PhD in translation and interpreting studies. He

is currently Senior Research Fellow at the University of Trieste (Italy) in the
Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies (IUSLIT),
where he lectures on specialised translation from Spanish into Italian. His
research interests include corpus linguistics, legal phraseology, legal translation
training, Languages for Special Purposes, genre analysis and corpus-assisted
critical discourse studies. He has published widely in the area of legal and judicial
discourse from a contrastive corpus-based perspective.
Law, Language and Communication
Series Editors
Anne Wagner, Université du Littoral Cott d’Opale, France and
Vijay Kumar Bhatia, formerly of City University of Hong Kong

This series encourages innovative and integrated perspectives within and across
the boundaries of law, language and communication, with particular emphasis
on issues of communication in specialized socio-legal and professional contexts.
It seeks to bring together a range of diverse yet cumulative research traditions in
order to identify and encourage interdisciplinary research.
The series welcomes proposals - both edited collections as well as single­
authored monographs - emphasizing critical approaches to law, language and
communication, identifying and discussing issues, proposing solutions to problems,
offering analyses in areas such as legal construction, interpretation, translation
and de-codification.

Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings

A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective
Edited by Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo

Fiction and the Languages of Law

Understanding Contemporary Legal Discourse
Karen Petroski

Law and Imagination in Troubled Times

A Legal and Literary Discourse
Edited by Richard Mullender, Matteo Nicolini, Thomas D.C. Bennett and Emilia
Mickiewicz

Social Media in Legal Practice

Edited by Vijay Bhatia and Girolamo Tessuto

Law, Language and the Courtroom

Legal Linguistics and the Discourse of Judges
Edited by Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Law-Language-and-Communication/book-series/LAWLANGCOMM
Law, Language and the
Courtroom
Legal Linguistics and the Discourse of
Judges

Edited by Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski

and Gianluca Pontrandolfo

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski
and Gianluca Pontrandolfo; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo
to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the
authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice’. Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-367-72185-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-72188-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-15377-1 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003153771

Typeset in Galliard
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

List of contributors viii

Foreword x
Editors’ introduction xvi

PART I
Constructing judicial discourse and judicial identities 1

1 The judicial English Eurolect: a genre profiling of CJEU

judgments 3
LUCJA BIEL, DARIUSZ KOZBIAL AND DARIUSZ MÜLLER

2 Evidentiality in US Supreme Court opinions: focus on

passive structures with say and tell 26
MAGDALENA SZCZYRBAK

3 Standardisation in the judicial discourse: the case of the

evolution of the French Arrets de la Cour de Cassation and
the use of forms in European procedural law 39
MARGARETE FLÔTER DURR AND PAULINA NOWAK-KORCZ

4 The consensus case law of the European Court of Human

Rights in light of the Court’s legitimacy over time: a
corpus-linguistic perspective 51
ANNE LISE KJÆR

5 Spider Woman beats Hulk: Baroness Hale and the

prorogation of Parliament 69
RUTH BREEZE
vi Contents
PART II
Judicial argumentation and evaluative language 83

6 Making a corpus-linguistic U-turn in multilingual

adjudication 85
MARTINA BAJCIC

7 Evaluative language and strategic manoeuvring in the

justification of judicial decisions: the case of teleological-
evaluative argumentation 98
STANISLAW GOZDZ-ROSZKOWSKI

8 “Without proof of negligence or a causative connection”:

on causal argumentation in the discourse of the Supreme
Court of Ireland’s judgments on data protection 112
DAVIDE MAZZI

9 A corpus-based comparative analysis of the evaluative

lexicon found in judicial decisions on immigration 126
MARÍA JOSÉ MARÍN PÉREZ

PART III
Judicial interpretation

10 Pedagogies of context: language ideology and expression

rights at the European Court of Human Rights 147
JESSICA GREENBERG

11 Free speech, artistic expression and blasphemy laws within

the ECHR margin of appreciation 160
JOANNA KULESZA

12 The US Supreme Court’s language of racism 173

KATHRYN M. STANCHI

13 Do the words of the American Constitution still matter?

The question of “the meaning of meaning” in current
judicial argumentation 185
ANNA TOMZA-TULEJSKA AND J. PATRICK HIGGINS
 Contents vii
14 How interdisciplinarity could improve the scientific value
of legal studies of international judicial decisions 198
MAREK JAN WASINSKI

PART IV
Clarity in judicial discourse 215

15 Conveying the right message: principles and problems of

multilingual communication at the European Court of
Human Rights 217
JAMES BRANNAN

16 Concision and clarity in Italian court proceedings 231

ANTONIO MURA AND JACQUELINE VISCONTI

Index 243
Contributors

Martina Bajcic, University of Rijeka, [email protected]

https: //orcid.org/0000-0003-0654-6779
Eucja Biel, University of Warsaw, [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3671-3112
James Brannan, Senior Translator, European Court of Human Rights,
j ames. [email protected]
Ruth Breeze, University of Navarra, [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8132-225X
Margarete Flôter-Durr, University of Strasbourg, [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4667-9277
Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski, University of Lodz, [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4323-8647
Jessica Greenberg, University of Illinois, [email protected]

J. Patrick Higgins, University of Lodz, [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4405-2614
Anne Lise Kjær, University of Copenhagen, [email protected]

Dariusz Kozbial, University of Warsaw, [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4395-3138
Joanna Kulesza, University of Lodz, [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0390-6062
María José Marín Pérez, University of Murcia, [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0177-4860
 Contributors ix
Davide Mazzi, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, [email protected]

Dariusz Müller, University of Warsaw, [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7138-6284
Antonio Mura, Prosecutor General at the Rome Court of Appeal,
[email protected]
Paulina Nowak-Korcz, University of Lodz, [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7857-7171
Gianluca Pontrandolfo, University of Trieste, [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9128-0321
Kathryn M. Stanchi, William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada,
kathryn. [email protected]
Dieter Stein, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, [email protected]

Magdalena Szczyrbak, Jagiellonian University, Krakow,

[email protected]
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0182-0938
Anna Tomza-Tulejska, University of Lodz, [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3300-5997
Jacqueline Visconti, University of Genoa/Honorary Research Fellow at
Birmingham University, [email protected]
Marek Jan Wasihski, University of Lodz, [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0109-9164
Foreword

This book is another significant contribution to the field of legal linguistics as

covered by the activities of the International Language and Law Association
(ILLA) with the aim of presenting scientific, language-based approaches to the
domain of law. It adds to the already existing body of published work produced
in the context of ILLA general and specialised/focus conferences.
From a philosophical perspective, there are roughly two ways of understanding
how law exists: the first view sees law in a legal-positive way through linguistic
“fiat” acts, involving speech acts of a much-discussed kind. The other view is
“performative” in character as it sees law in existence, and in continuous develop­
ment, through acts of adjudication. Both perspectives on how law can come into
existence involve the use of language in constitutive ways.
Development and interpretation of law are at a first go easier to conceptualise
in a performative view of law: just as language changes permanently through use
in ever new situations - unless you adhere to some form of unrealistic “struc­
tural” static Procrustean idea of language - so each act of adjudication is different,
and consequently law changes permanently.
This dynamic aspect of law is therefore less of a problem for a performative
view than for a legal-positivist view of law. Naturally, legal interpretation and the
bounds of vagueness of statutes - intended or unintended - offer natural spaces
for gravitational shifting in shaping legal norms. Evolution of law also takes place
in peri-legal processes like arbitration.
But a very specific playground for shifting currents to carve out new more
entrenched directions and pathways is the court, and in particular the specific
situation of transnational European justice systems, such as the European courts.
The topics of the present volume represent a variety of issues and processes
related to how law is made by performing it in the courts.
The topics treated in this volume present a rich fabric of recurrent motives
and themes, some of which I will take up in this foreword, not necessarily in the
order in which they appear in the volume, but by relevance to theoretical and
methodological issues that have come to the fore in recent developments in the
field of legal linguistics. This procedure seems also justified by the fact that most
chapters are woven into this fabric through several links, and I will take the liberty
to single out and give prominence to individual such links.
 Foreword xi
The present volume is more concerned with how law “is made” through the
process of applying the law, even though it may appear to be locked in by statutes.
The European courts present a very specific challenge, as they have to navigate
the space between general principles - like freedom of speech - guarded by the
transnational court on the one hand and the national legislations. Typically, the
European situations in courts involve a structural dialectic between national law
on the one side and transnational, European law on the other. The situation is
often characterised by divergences in legal attitudes between national, cultural­
based norms and the postulates of general principles like freedom of speech. The
standard way to handle the necessary positioning and compromise between both
different national states and individual national states versus the European Court
of Human Rights (ECtHR), and therefore key concepts in law making in the
European situation, are the notions of the “consensus” and the “margin of inter­
pretation”, which figure prominently in a couple of chapters.
Contrary to a common expectation that a key concept like consensus would
be standardised in its conceptual meaning and word form, it is the case that
there is a range of competing lexemes that are candidates for referential identity
with consensus, such as “trend”, “tendencies” or “virtual consensus”. While the
European legal world encourages us to treat these competing terms as synonyms,
Kjær (Chapter 4) turns up substantial evidence from massive linguistic electronic
corpus analyses that tells against such an assumption of reference identity - or at
best, meaning identity. It will be interesting to see if the legal world will listen
to the linguistic analysis and eventually offer a solution to what must appear a
challenge to the doctrinal side. While the linguistic fact of variation is based on
divergences in legal doctrine, there is also variation in the interpretation of trans­
national or universal legal concepts tied to linguistic issues.
Just as in the case of consensus, variation and standardisation (Flôter-Durr and
Nowak-Korcz, Chapter 3) are an issue in both legal and linguistic perspectives.
On a hierarchically higher level of expressions (as in prepositional phrases like
attendu que), the so-called formules (staying with the French term) are in the
nature of genre markers for judicial genres and have a discourse-structuring func­
tion. Their standardisation has been a major concern in efforts towards clarity
and standardisation in the French system - and on a higher level, on the Euro­
pean level of j udicial language - and might well become part of a drift towards a
Eurolect, such as discussed by Biel, Kozbial and Müller (Chapter 1). Idac formules
also include so-called legal standards, which are even a larger legal issue as they
are a major built-in source of vagueness and are therefore by their very relative
nature recalcitrant to standardisation.
Moving to the content of reasoning itself, this core process of courts is hap­
pening in language and is in very specific ways tied to beliefs and ideologies
about language in situations where the same use of language is at issue in cases
where charges are brought against uses of language for offensive or hurtful lan­
guage, as in the case discussed by Greenberg (Chapter 10). The author demon­
strates how the charge itself (the famous Handyside case, involving a charge of
offensive speech corrupting youths through its explicit depiction of drugs, sex
xii Foreword
and other sensitive issues) hinges on a conception of what the “text” is, whether
a text pure as a string of morphemes with language meanings or the product of
comprehensional construction contextualised by national local cultural presup­
positions. Greenberg shows how the ECtHR carves out a “margin of apprecia­
tion” by manoeuvring between the absoluteness of the legal principle and the
national (in this case English) moral presuppositions, again in a metadiscursive
way involving specific ideas of what “language” and “text” are. The ECtHR aims
to strike a sensible compromise between national conditions and a more abstract
principle of free speech that is definitional for a liberal democracy, but within
limits - which are again nationally defined. Where the consensus (cf. above) is to
be found depends on the way language ideologies about the nature of the text
are located.
Another instantiation of this important theme of the specific linguistic situa­
tion in Europe - exemplifying paradigmatically how culture, language and law
are inextricably tied up with each other in the issue of the “translation” of inter­
national rights, such as the freedom of speech, into national adjudication - is
presented by Kulesza (Chapter 11), on the example of Polish blasphemy laws.
She shows how national legal practices use a “margin of appreciation” approach
to navigate a compromise between the more universal right and national cultural
exigencies. A linguistically intriguing differentiation between “insulting” and
“offending” exemplifies how intimately interwoven linguistic and legal issues are.
Moving from judicial activities in making law to citizens receiving the law as
handed down by the court, Breeze’s contribution (Chapter 5) shows how the
people for whom the law is made at the receiving end can be beguiled into a kind
of meaning making of judgments on their part that borders on demagoguery
by the media and parties with vested interests behind them. Breeze’s chapter is
an illuminating exercise in how a post-Brexit public can be induced to contex­
tualise and interpret a ruling by a female British High Court judge (Baroness
Hale’s ruling declaring Johnson’s dissolution of Parliament unlawful) in populist,
even Trumpian and misogynistic terms, and in the process instrumentalising the
female judge’s brooch. While in this particular case populist ideologies are instru­
mentalised in framing reactions to a judgment, Stanchi (Chapter 12) identifies
another deep layer of cultural presuppositions, this time racism, on the other side:
in the rulings of the Supreme Court. Racism is identified not only in what is said,
as is commonly done, but the chapter is remarkable in identifying a kind of “weak
rhetoric” which is manifested by not calling decisions racist or by not explicitly
calling decisions racist where this would be expected.
Law is not a solipsistic institution that exists for itself, but it is a normative
system that regulates the lives of the individuals to the extent that these individu­
als are social beings and citizens. One group of chapters addresses an issue that
is central to this raison d’être of the law, to the extent that it is formulated and
executed in language: it is, among other things, the medium through which law
is accessed by the citizens as social and political beings. The complaint is that
language, in this function as transmission belt - or, in fact, the “translator” -
between the normative system and its execution in law in action and in relating to
 Foreword xiii
citizens, has long been recognised both in the linguistic and the legal community,
be it in the popular complaints about the complexity of the language of statutes
or rulings, or in discussions relating to jury instructions or more serious linguistic
concerns, such as represented in the chapter by Mura and Visconti (Chapter 16).
The authors point out that, beyond the “default” issue of linguistic obstacles to
the accessibility to the law, there are added and exacerbating factors contributing
to the urgency to introduce reform: there are both local historical and stylistic
traditions of legal language in Italy and the internationalisation of law in Europe
(and, one may add, in the world). Concrete steps to accommodate language and
the law to the comprehensibility needs of the citizens are becoming ever more
imperative. Mura and Visconti describe not only the formulation of the need but
the factual concrete steps that have been and are being taken - a welcome change
from proclamation to enforcement.
What essentially makes a citizen a citizen is political participation and access
to the law. The latter is challenged in Europe in a specific way. In addition to
the usual or default challenge by the way what is perceived (variously) as the
obscurity and the complexity of legal language, there is the challenge of being
conducted in several languages, giving rise to issues of translation and the con­
comitant legal issue of constancy of especially legal meanings. The contribution
by Brannan (Chapter 15) gives a concrete overview of the types of text that are
produced in the context of the ECtHR and that are implicated in this discussion
of both the stylistic complexity of the texts produced and the issues arising from
the coexistence of different language versions.
While most chapters have a European focus, there is a group of chapters that
deal with American issues but that take up issues that also surface in principle in
the European context. Tomza-Tulejska and Higgins (Chapter 13) address the
issue of “legal interpretation”, where the American Constitution is the classical
text and object of interpretation, as (as the authors see it) the language of the
Constitution is linguistically deficient as it contains too many expressions that
were left vague due to the linguistic situation at the time of drafting. The authors
discuss the main conflicting schools of interpretation and suggest a theory of
“judicial behaviour” as a guiding principle.
There is, finally, a group of chapters that deal with important meta-issues that
are at the bottom of interpretative activities. While deficiencies in language are
seen by Tomza-Tulejska and Higgins as something that gave rise to interpretive
schools as a kind of remedy, invoking the analysis of language and the linguis­
tic base of the law and seeing inherent linguistic indeterminacy as an aspect of
normative indeterminacy is seen by Wasinski (Chapter 14) as a move towards
a more scientific character of normative work and adjudication as the hitherto
unscientific aspect of the world of law, and narrowing the gap between the norm­
executing, practical side of the world of the law and the scientific character of dis­
ciplines - among them linguistics - that are applied to “explaining” legal norms.
As a major methodological development, the chapters in this volume manifest
a clear trend towards the increasing use of electronic tools: computers and cor­
pora. While most chapters more or less make use of these tools, there is a group
xiv Foreword
of chapters whose merit is achieved by these tools in a prominent way. This new
development comes in two shapes: at the “top” is the use in adjudication, legal
interpretation and legal translation, and at the “bottom” is the use of corpus data
by the linguist to investigate interpretable quantitative language data to access
a variety of inherent features of the legal discourse. As an example of the latter
approach, Mazzi (Chapter 8) identifies as a result of automatic corpus analysis
clustering of n-grams into bundles which are then linked in a qualitative inter­
pretive step to types of causative argumentation in judgments. In a similar vein,
Marín Pérez (Chapter 9) takes as a logical point of departure the results of a cor­
pus search, carried out like the other chapters in this group with considerable sta­
tistical sophistication, of expressions, together with their first- and second-order
collocates, of affective stance in English and Spanish court judgments. Several
interesting results are turned up which point to interesting differences between
the Spanish and English corpus, such as the importance of the odio (hate) in
the Spanish corpus, or the lower degree of evaluative judgments in the Spanish
corpus compared to the British corpus, arguably due to the nature of common
law as judges’ law. These chapters make an important contribution to identify
ideologies in jurisdiction that might not become transparent or at least might not
so well be documentable without this type of data.
It is methodologically characteristic of the latter group of chapters, those that
start at the “bottom” end, to logically employ a bottom-up procedure in two
ways. These chapters either predefine what kind of expression is evaluative or let
the computer define via cluster analysis that could be interpreted as evaluative.
This is based on an a priori concept of what “evaluation” is semantically.
The other group of chapters do employ electronic corpus analysis, but they
pursue a top-down concept in that there is a logically preceding concept of the
superstructura!, functional structure of the genre at hand, and there is an inter­
pretive procedure that identifies lexical structures that perform functions that
define given superstructura! slots. The approach is in principle primarily a close
reading and qualitative one. In the case analysis presented by Gozdz-Roszkowski
(Chapter 7), the focus is on which lexical structures carry evaluative meanings in
the structural genre slot “argumentation”, one of the four canonical structural
slots of the genre. These evaluative structures are pivotal in that they mark the
reasons picked - among other legal-interpretational options - and which move
the judicial decision in a particular interpretive reason, in this case a teleologically
informed judicial interpretive direction.
As these expressions are more of an open set and not a priori fixed, they receive
their “meaning” only within the genre frame. Such an integrational, top-down
procedure must appear intuitively much more satisfying than operating with the
(unlikely) assumption that certain expressions will once and forever and in all
genre and usage contexts have the same function.
Representative for the effect of the new technical medial affordances at the
“top” end is also the chapter by Bajcic (Chapter 6), who argues for the creation
of parallel corpora of EU legislation in order to help fulfil an important legal
 Foreword xv
postulate that national adjudication has to apply in conformity with all other
language versions of a law.
In one of the chapters that deal with the American situation, Szczyrbak
(Chapter 2) deals with a very specific variety of the intersection between law
and language, one that captures an element of linguistic development, not legal
or doctrinal. The opinions formulated by judges (in this case the US Supreme
Court) are based on arguments and evidence. These must be understood as
“authenticated” by referring to the sources. It is not the arguments themselves
but the way they are presented as authenticated that is the subject of this chapter.
Focusing on passive structures, Szczyrbak demonstrates that there has been con­
siderable and hitherto unaccounted for development in the grammatical way to
express evidentiality in the case of passive structures involving “tell” and “says”
since 1790.
Another chapter that deals with linguistic development in the legal domain is
concerned with a varietal development within EU law. Biel, Kozbial and Müller
(Chapter 1) substantiate empirically, on the basis of a large electronic corpus
study, the pre-existing impression that there seems to be developing a kind of
“Eurolect”, in the sense that the law domain evolves a domain-specific variety that
is distinct from common law legal style and that is also internally differentiated
by types of legal written genres. This development is just as interesting from the
varieties-linguistic view, as it is based not on lexical markers but on syntactic and
discourse-structural ones. Biel et al. discuss the possible internal sources of this
development, such as the specific language regimen with its particular translation
directions and therefore lines of linguistic influences in these areas of grammar.
What is significant is the very fact that the bottom line is the development of a
variety as an identity-building element.
This volume offers an impressive panorama of how language is deeply and criti­
cally involved in all facets of making law in the context of courts and their modes
of operation on all levels of analysis. There is a wide range of methodologies in
demonstrating how the analysis of language can provide access to the workings
and determinants of the judicial process in an equally wide range of types of cases
and legal issues. I am confident that this volume, with all its results and valences
for further directions of research, will represent another standard-setting mile­
stone in the further development of legal linguistics.
Dieter Stein
Heinrich-Heine-University Dusseldorf
Editors’ introduction

The genesis of this book was an international conference, Spotlights on Courts:

Judges and Their Discourse from a Multidisciplinary Perspective, planned to be
held at the University of Lodz in September 2020 but then postponed (online)
to March 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Organised under the auspices
of the International Law and Language Association (ILLA), it brought together
law, linguistics and anthropology scholars interested in the various relationships
between law and language. The meeting drove home the simple truth that it is
essential to foster intellectual cross-fertilisation if we want to broaden our under­
standing of complex and multifarious phenomena such as judicial discourse. The
importance of judicial decision-making and its surrounding discourse is often
taken for granted. However, recent outbreaks of the rule of law crisis in Europe
and the contemporary challenges posed by populism and disinformation for
people’s perceptions of European democratic institutions, including courts and
the justice system, have highlighted the need for a closer examination of how
judges justify their decisions and how their output is discursively constructed,
interpreted and perceived by other legal, institutional and social actors as well
as the public.
It comes as a surprise to realise how few monographs or edited volumes have
delved into the intricacies of the language of judges seen from a multitude of
perspectives. Our aim, therefore, has been to look closely into the different
phases of constructing and interpreting judicial discourse and also into its mani­
fold faces. Released 25 years after Lawrence Solan’s milestone The Language of
Judges, this book has been envisaged to fill the void by offering a distinctly uni­
fied volume integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches and making use
of a plethora of analytical methods. It is an attempt to open, update and extend
various avenues of research that have been made possible thanks to fruitful col­
laboration between linguists and lawyers within the framework of the burgeon­
ing field of legal linguistics. It is precisely from the legal linguistics perspective
that we examine different forms of discourse from EU, common law and civil
law jurisdictions with the final (and basic) aim of understanding how language
works in judicial contexts.
In an attempt to scrutinise as many dimensions of the phenomenon as pos­
sible, we use a wide range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives to
 Editors’ introduction xvii
look in detail at the ways judicial discourse is argued, constructed, interpreted
and perceived. This is why the contributions in this book explore patterns of
linguistic organisation and use in judicial institutions and analyse language as
an instrument for understanding both the judicial decision-making process and
its outcome. Its ultimate goal is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth over­
view of current critical issues of the crucial role of language in judicial settings
and to map out current developments in the research into judicial discourse
against the complex background of the rapidly changing world of law.
We believe that the methodological strengths of this book lie in the already
mentioned cross-fertilisation made possible by the different backgrounds of the
contributors (legal linguists, lawyers, legal scholars, legal practitioners, legal trans­
lators and anthropologists). That they come from different geographical areas of
the world (Poland, France, Denmark, Spain, Croatia, Italy and the United States)
is an additional strength of the volume.
With a view to offering a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of judicial dis­
course from different research perspectives, we have arranged the contributions
around four major themes reflecting what we believe are the most central issues
in the field: constructing judicial discourse and judicial identities (Part I), judicial
argumentation and evaluative language (Part II), judicial interpretation (Part III)
and clarity in judicial discourse (Part IV).

Contributions to the volume

Part I focuses on the linguistic construal of judicial discourse and on the views
on judges and courts.
In Chapter 1, Eucja Biel, Dariusz Kozbial and Dariusz Müller profile the
judicial variety of the English Eurolect. To better understand the genre profile
of judgments issued by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU),
the authors sketch it against (1) UK Supreme Court (UKSC) judgments to
track its hybridisation and (2) EU legal acts to identify its similarities and dif­
ferences to this fundamental legal genre. They use large comparable corpora
of texts published in 2010-2019. Compared to regulations, judgments use
more argumentative patterns, interpersonal and textual metadiscourse, and
more verbs, determiners, adverbs and subordinators. Their findings confirm
the existence of the judicial English Eurolect, pointing to distinct CJEU and
UKSC judicial styles. In particular, CJEU judgments more actively use features
which foreground impartiality, power and distance: more rigid macrostruc­
ture, depersonalised authorial presence, stronger modals, distant determiners,
organisational markers (inference, addition, apposition as opposed to more
confrontational contrast/concession markers), numerals and framing with
complex prepositions. They are also less lexically rich and use fewer verbs,
which reduces their dynamicity. Our data also demonstrate the considerable
internal variation of CJEU judgments, with General Court (GC) judgments
being more convergent to UKSC judgments in terms of length and selected
key genre markers.
xviii Editors’ introduction
In Chapter 2, Magdalena Szczyrbak looks at passive structures with say and
tell in US Supreme Court opinions and explores their diachronic developments
(179Os-present) and examines their evidential and discourse-organising uses. The
analysis focuses on it is said (that) and the present-tense variants of the BE said to
and BE told (that) constructions, and it reveals that the structures report informa­
tion which is attributable to named sources, found in the co-text, and also ensure
cohesion and mark progression in the text. The data also demonstrate that it is
said (that) came out of fashion in the second half of the 20th century, whereas we
are told (that) became more frequent in the second decade of the 20th century.
The least variability was noted in the case of the BE said to construction. Taken
together, the trends seem to indicate a move away from impersonal discourse
towards a more direct style.
In Chapter 3, Margarete Floter-Durr and Paulina Nowak-Korcz explore
standardisation in judicial discourse by taking as example the French arrêts de la
Cour de Cassation and the use of forms in European procedural law. Standardi­
sation in judicial discourse can be analysed on two levels, linguistic and legal,
with regard to concepts pertaining both to positive law and to procedural law.
In fact, these two levels are not distinct but entwined, since law as a discursive
phenomenon is part of the language. The approach on such a twofold level
reflects the two dimensions of standardisation: “the speciality, which is system­
atically linked to a discipline of reference, on the one hand, and, on the other
hand, the linguistic and discursive dimension which can be assessed by analysing
texts.” The authors demonstrate that standardisation is a pervasive phenomenon
both linguistically and legally. Linguistically, the major difficulty regarding the
standard lies in the variety of formulations being used. While the standard may
take the form of a noun, it may also come in the form of adjectives, adverbs or
adnominal phrases.
In Chapter 4, Anne Lise Kjær investigates the consensus case law of the Euro­
pean Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) from a corpus-linguistic perspective.
Consensus is applied by the Court when it is in need of interpreting the European
Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) dynamically in light of the present-day
conditions in the Member States. The Court has used various different phrases
over time to denote the concept of consensus (e.g. consensus, trend, common
¿round common denominator, a uniform or common approach, a common stand­
ard) . In legal research, it is maintained that the variations in terminology do not
affect the legal meaning of the concept, and especially, that consensus and trend
are synonymous. Based on an empirical corpus-based study of Grand Chamber
judgments, the author shows that the practical meaning of the terms is not identi­
cal. Consensus and trend are not used interchangeably by the Court, and the use
of consensus increases more over time than trend. In a sociolegal perspective, the
results reflect the legitimacy crisis that the Court is experiencing in the present
time. It is under attack from national governments that have taken over the role
of lawmaking that should rightly be the task of national parliaments. This has
caused the Court to show “self-restraint” by preferring a consensual rather than
an evolutive interpretation of the Convention.
 Editors’ introduction xix
In Chapter 5, Ruth Breeze examines the digital media representations of the
2019 UK Supreme Court’s ruling that declared Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s
suspension of Parliament to be unlawful. Using framing analysis supported by cor­
pus-assisted discourse analysis, it explores how this ruling, and presiding Supreme
Court Judge Baroness Hale, were woven into public debates concerning Brexit
and democracy. Digital comments on the events were subsumed into populist
anti-establishment frames, and the judges themselves were discredited through
symbolic representations as “conspiratorial”, “unpatriotic”, and “treacherous”,
with particular misogynist undertones evoked through references to witchcraft
and the supernatural used in the context of Baroness Hale herself.
Part II covers judicial argumentation and evaluation from the viewpoint of the
strategies adopted by judges in the judicial decision-making process. The chapters
in this part highlight the key role played by axiological values used by judges in
their decisions.
In Chapter 6, Martina Bajcic explores the role corpus linguistics can play in
judicial interpretation. Despite initial scepticism of legal scholars towards the
application of linguistics to jurisprudence, tools and methodologies of linguis­
tic disciplines are today convincingly applied to judicial interpretation. In fact,
some countries have witnessed a corpus-linguistic turn in jurisprudence, as
judges endorse the use of corpus linguistics in construing the meaning of statu­
tory instruments. Shifting the focus to the potential usage of parallel corpora
in judicial decision-making, this chapter hypothesises whether parallel corpora
can facilitate the multilingual interpretation of EU law, deriving arguments from
analysed case law. It is maintained that parallel corpora of EU legislation could
by employed to compare different language versions and in order to comply with
the principle of consistent interpretation, putting the spotlight on the national
courts of EU Member States.
In Chapter 7, Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski integrates the linguistic study of
evaluation into the model of strategic manoeuvring embraced within the pragma­
dialectic approach in order to shed light on discursive practices adopted by judges
in the justifications of their decisions. The concept of critical discussion was
adopted to reconstruct the different stages of the Supreme Court of Poland’s jus­
tification and to determine how evaluative language contributes to the realisation
of each move in the argumentational discourse. The analysis is grounded in the
argumentative reality of cassation proceedings heard before the Supreme Court.
The study reveals that the use of evaluative language is motivated institutionally
when the Supreme Court reiterates and attributes to the Attorney-General the
negative assessment of the Appeals Court’s decision in order to signal a differ­
ence of opinion and to establish the compliance of the cassation appeal with the
formal requirements of the cassation procedure. Evaluative lexis appears salient
in the argumentation stage where it expresses a positive assessment of the Court
of Appeal’s argumentation in light of the attacks by the Attorney-General. The
results show that the Supreme Court in its justification manoeuvres strategically
to resolve both the difference of opinion and to determine the argumentative role
of a contested legal rule. The latter was achieved by using teleological-evaluative
xx Editors' introduction
argumentation as a counterargument to reject an interpretation proposed by the
Attorney- General.
In Chapter 8, Davide Mazzi investigates the discourse and use of causal
argumentation in a corpus of the Supreme Court of Ireland’s judgments on
data protection. The research consisted of two main stages. The first was a
preliminary quantitative study of recurrent phraseology in order to identify its
most common usage patterns in context. The second stage lay in a qualita­
tive study of the judgments, where the usage patterns established earlier on
were observed to be most frequent. This allowed to detect and reconstruct
textual sequences embedding causal argumentation. While phraseology was
observed to shed light on the subject matter covered by the corpus as well as the
interpretive and argumentative dimensions inherent in the Court’s discourse,
the argumentative analysis provided evidence of the flexibility of causal argu­
mentation as a reasoning tool that ties in with valid legal norms at two main
levels. The first is the combination of causality with more literal approaches to
legal text. The second level is represented by more schematic or teleological
approaches to norms, as was the case with the necessity to embrace principles or
uphold values underlying domestic statutes, international law or the Constitu­
tion of Ireland.
In Chapter 9, María José Marín Pérez compares two sets of Spanish and Brit­
ish judicial decisions which revolve around the topic of immigration. The lexical
networks of some of the terms falling under the category affect, as defined by
systemic linguistics, were obtained. Using the statistical data associated to their
constituents as a point of departure, the scrutiny of these vocabulary items led to
the identification of fundamental topics. Such topics illustrate the key concerns
and the legal trouble that surround the process of seeking asylum or migrating to
a European country in both the Spanish and the British legal systems. Reuniting
families, the depiction of the living conditions of vulnerable migrants or escap­
ing criminal organisations, which children and women are prey to, stand among
the most frequent scenarios which migrants are involved in, as portrayed in both
legal corpora.
Part III focuses on the semantics and interpretation of judicial decisions seen
from the perspective of legal scholars. In sharp contrast with the previous two
parts, mainly characterised by a strong empirical (corpus-based) basis, the chap­
ters in this part are more theoretically oriented, showing the importance of quali­
tative analyses in judicial linguistics.
In Chapter 10, Jessica Greenberg investigates how judicial language ideolo­
gies (beliefs about the social significance and power of language) shape the way
courts regulate speech and freedom of expression. The author analyses key cases
at the ECtHR, arguing that analysis of expression rights needs to account for
beliefs about speech as a set of social relations and textual and interpretative
practices. In analysing speech as a social and ideological process rather than a
matter of content, we can better understand how judges determine the limits of
legal management of speech and the balance between margin of appreciation and
individual rights.
 Editors’ introduction xxi
In Chapter 11, Joanna Kulesza highlights the diversity in applying the ECtHR
margin of appreciation doctrine. The author discusses the evolution of the
Court’s jurisprudence based on Article 10 of the ECHR in the context of recent
case law. The author reviews key decisions and attempts to reconstruct notions
crucial to national judicial discourses among Council of Europe countries, mak­
ing references to current national and regional events. The ECtHR “margin of
appreciation” doctrine is set against local perceptions of morality, public decency
and third-party interests. Spanning from Das Liebeskonzil through the case of
Sinkova v. Ukraine up to recent Polish case law dealing with public statements
by celebrities and controversial religious art, the author attempts to identify and
define linguistic concepts crucial to drawing a legal line for free speech in Europe.
In Chapter 12, Kathryn M. Stanchi explores the US Supreme Court’s use of
the words “racism”, “racist” and “white supremacy”, treating these expressions as
cultural keywords, which are words that are socially prominent but which change
meaning over time. The chapter’s thesis is that the Supreme Court exerts power­
ful influence over the cultural meaning of these keywords. The author explores
several patterns in the Supreme Court’s use of the keywords. First, the Supreme
Court never once uses the words in a majority opinion to acknowledge the racism
of a prior Supreme Court decision, even when overturning a plainly racist deci­
sion. Second, the use of the words in separate decisions to criticise the Court is
infrequent and has decreased in frequency. Third, the use of the words to deny or
minimise the harms of racism has increased in frequency. Thus, the language of
the Court has contributed to the distortion of the definitions of racism and white
supremacy. This distortion makes it more difficult for advocates to pursue racial
justice, particularly through the federal courts.
In Chapter 13, Anna Tomza-Tulejska and J. Patrick Higgins discuss the current
positions of American scientists on the role of the meaning of words within judi­
cial argumentation, thus answering the question posed in the title of the chapter:
whether the problem of the meaning of the meaning of the words used in the
Constitution is still relevant in the newest branch of American jurisprudence,
judicial science. The current theories of American law propose several leading
ways to argue judicial decisions, the most popular being textualism, originalism,
intentionalism and judicial activism. Their common feature is a foundation in the
philosophy of language, which considers the meaning of words. Each of them
perceives the role of the meaning of the words, used by the Founding Fathers
in creating the Constitution, in a different way, as demonstrated in the chapter.
In Chapter 14, Marek Jan Wasinski reflects upon the mainstream, normative
approach to analysing decisions of international courts. The author presents a
critique of the strand of this academic practice that is sometimes denounced for
producing allegedly unscientific outputs aimed pragmatically at organising case
law, explaining judgments or merely opining on the technical correctness of inter­
pretation made by an adjudicating body. It is posited that the intrinsic limits of
the normative jurisprudence have prompted some normative scholars to borrow
from the non-mainstream toolbox, thus avoiding the accusation of subjectivism
and unscientific practice.
xxii Editors’ introduction
Part IV draws inspiration from a highly topical issue in courtroom discourse,
the importance of clarity and plain language, seen from two different but comple­
mentary perspectives: European and national.
In Chapter 15, James Brannan looks at the way in which the ECtEIR dis­
seminates its case law and considers how its language and style are not necessarily
barriers to effective reception or implementation. The Court conveys its message
in various forms, mainly through the texts of its judgments and decisions, with
emphasis on “key” cases, but also through case law notes, press releases and other
material. Efforts have been made over the years to broaden its readership espe­
cially in view of the language barrier, which is the result of having just two official
languages (French and English) and limited resources for translation. Strasbourg
judgments may also be criticised as “foreign”, unidiomatic or convoluted in style,
and not sufficiently accessible to the general public. The chapter answers the fol­
lowing question: how is the Court’s “production” perceived by the wider audi­
ence (lawyers and laypersons), and does it convey its message effectively across
47 European States?
In Chapter 16, Antonio Mura and Jacqueline Visconti report on the main
achievements of an Italian project on clarity and concision in court proceed­
ings carried out by a group of leading experts appointed by the Italian Minister
of Justice in February 2018. The overall result was the perception that, besides
introducing specific reforms in the legislation, what was necessary was to achieve
a global culture of clarity in judicial writing, one that would motivate both judges
and counsels to distance themselves from stereotypical legalese habits. Avenues
for further research are highlighted, such as an enlargement of the scope of the
investigation to other judicial systems, in particular to the one that lies farthest
from the Italian (continental) legal culture: common law.
We believe that this book can be of use not only for experienced scholars who
study judicial discourse but also for legal practitioners (judges, advocates, etc.),
legal translators and students who consider pursuing research in the area. It is
our hope that the work of all the authors in this collection will help and inspire
these scholars, practitioners and students along their study, professional practice
and research paths.

Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo

Part I

Constructing judicial
discourse and judicial
identities
Taylor &. Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
htt p://1ay lora ndfra nc i sxom
1 The judicial English Eurolect
A genre profiling of
CJEU judgments
Lueja Biel, Dariusz Kozbial and Dariusz Muller

Eurolects are “Europeanised” hybrid varieties of national languages which have

evolved to serve the linguistic needs of the European Union (EU) functioning as
a supranational organisation. These are 24 “mirror” realisations in the official EU
languages, mediated through various stakeholders, including translators and revisers.
As a result, they are linguistically constrained and different from the corresponding
national legal varieties of EU languages (Biel 2020, pp. 315-316). While most of the
existing and recently growing studies on Eurolects focus on legal acts (cf. Biel 2014;
Mori 2018), their judicial variety has rarely been studied until now (cf. Kozbial
2020).1 This niche is filled by the present chapter, which examines the judicial Eng­
lish Eurolect. Although EU judgments are originally drafted in French, our interest
lies in the English-language versions (translations) due to the increasing role of Eng­
lish both in EU institutions and across Europe. To profile the judicial Eurolect, we
contrast EU judgments with (1) a corpus of UK Supreme Court (UKSC) judgments
and (2) a corpus of EU legal acts. This study design is motivated by the fact that
legal acts and judgments belong to the same legal genre chain. As observed by Rob­
ertson (2015, p. 39), these genres capture two crucial phases - when law is created
and when it is interpreted and applied by courts - and hence form the nexus of the
strongest EU-related factors. Yet, although these genres may be expected to share
certain features common to all Eurolects, they have different contexts of production,
communicative purposes and discourse communities. These differences are likely to
result in the legislative and judicial genres having distinct habitual sets of linguistic
conventions. Their comparison will allow us to understand how EU judgments dif­
fer from the related genre of EU legal acts, while the comparison to UK judgments
will shed more light on the hybridisation of judgments in the EU context.

1 The Court of Justice of the European Union and

its judicial style
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is the judicial institution
of the EU perceived as its constitutional and administrative court (Kuijper 2018,

1 See Kozbial (2020) on the judicial variety of the Polish Eurolect.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003153771-2
4 Lucja Biel et al.
pp. 81-82). It is the “supreme authority” on EU law and its judicial decisions
are one of the sources of EU law (Woods et al. 2017, pp. 46, 89). Functionally,
it deals with two main categories of cases: (1) references for a preliminary ruling
from national courts to interpret or assess the validity of EU law and (2) direct
actions against Member States and the EU institutions, which include actions for
failure to fulfil the obligations of a Member State, for annulment of EU legal acts,
for failure to act and for damages (Albors-Llorens 2017, pp. 263-267). These
two types of cases require the Court to adopt fundamentally different roles, adju­
dication in direct actions and interpretation in preliminary rulings:

In direct actions, the Court adjudicates on the dispute between the parties,
whereas in preliminary rulings it simply gives advice on a specific point of EU
law, leaving the final resolution of the dispute to the national court.
(Albors-Llorens 2017, p. 265)

Thematically, the CJEU decides mainly on economic matters (e.g. taxation, inter­
nal market, competition, intellectual property, state aid, agriculture, customs)
and increasingly more on other matters, such as judicial cooperation, the environ­
ment and social policy (Bobek 2015, p. 159).
The CJEU is composed of the General Court (GC) and the Court of Justice
(CJ). Acting as an administrative court, the GC hears at first instance actions
for damages and civil service cases as well as direct actions not involving dis­
putes between the Member States and the major EU institutions, whereas the
CJ, acting more as a constitutional court, examines all preliminary rulings, other
types of direct actions and appeals against the GC decisions on points of law (cf.
TFEU2 and Kuijper 2018, pp. 81-82). For example, according to the CJEU’s
2019 Annual Report,3 90% of new cases brought before the GC in 2019 were
direct actions, while in the case of the CJ, 66% of new cases were preliminary rul­
ings, 27% appeals and only 4% direct actions.
CJEU judgments are “a collective enterprise” of judges, Advocates General
and référendaires (Bobek 2015, p. 168). The GC currently has two judges from
each Member State, whereas the CJ has only one judge from each Member State
and 11 Advocates General. The Court sits mostly in the multinational and mul­
tilingual chambers of three and five judges (Woods et al. 2017, p. 46). Although
under the CJEU Rules of Procedure any of the EU’s official languages may be
chosen as the language of the case, judgments are deliberated on and drafted in
the CJEU’s only working language: French, or, more specifically, hybrid “Court
French” (Wright 2016, p. 3). De facto original judgments are translated into
the EU’s official languages by native lawyer-linguists (Derlén 2015, p. 58).

2 Consolidated version of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, OJ C 326/01,
October 26, 2012, pp. 47-390.
3 https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-05/ra_pan_2019_
interieur_en_final.pdf
 The judicial English Eurolect 5
In contrast to legal acts, the only authentic (de jure original) judgment is the one
translated into the language of the case (Derlen 2015, p. 58).
The internal arrangements of the CJEU are derived from continental models
where there is no system of binding precedent, at least “in the English sense”
(Woods et al. 2017, p. 48). Originally influenced by the French drafting style, the
CJEU has over the years developed its own judicial style, one more of a “civilian”
nature (Bobek 2015, p. 169; Wright 2016). Despite some differences between
the CJ and the GC, with the former having “somewhat enunciative/proclaim-
ing style” and the latter a “more argumentative style” (Kuijper 2018, p. 85),
there are common features. They include abstract deductive reasoning, a rather
succinct and depersonalised drafting style (compared to the common law tra­
dition), macrostructural and microstructural formulaicity, and extensive cluster
citations from previous rulings (Bobek 2015, pp. 169-170). The lack of dissent­
ing or concurring opinions results in a less clear and “enigmatic” “consensus lan­
guage” (Kuijper 2018, p. 85). Furthermore, from the common law perspective,
CJEU judgments may look “terse, cryptic, with little indication of the reasoning”
(Woods et al. 2017, p. 48), but this may well be a purposeful audience design: the
overwhelming majority of CJEU’s “judicial clients” are continental judges who
are accustomed to a civilian drafting style (Bobek 2015, p. 171).

2 EU English: the legislative and the judicial Eurolects

EU English has cemented its status as the EU’s lingua franca in the last two
decades. Except for the CJEU, English is the procedural language of the EU
institutions: it is the principal drafting language of legal acts and the main source
language of numerous v institutional documents. EU English is regarded as a
neutral metalanguage (Sarcevic 2010, pp. 34-35), quite frequently moulded by
non-native speakers to meet the EU’s institutional, political and legal needs (cf.
Biel et al. 2018). This, accompanied by the filtering through other EU working
languages, results in the hybridity of EU English. Additionally, EU English is
projected to strengthen its role in the post-Brexit EU and accelerate linguistic
nativisation through further hybridisation (Modiano 2017, pp. 319-321).
Corpus studies into the hybridity of EU English legislation did indeed report
differences with the British English variety at many levels: lexical (EU-specific
terminology, borrowings, acronyms, Latinisms), morphological (international
prefixes, e.g. inter-., non-), grammatical (e.g. shall as a deontic modal), phraseo­
logical (here- and there- compound prepositions, more complex prepositions with
referencing (in accordance with, pursuant to) and particularisation (as regards)
functions (cf. Biel 2015; Sandrelli 2018).
The status of EU English is obviously less prominent in the CJEU, where the
working language is French. Because judgments are (1) based on pleadings trans­
lated from the language of the case into French (Wright 2016, p. 6), (2) deliber­
ated and drafted in French by mainly non-native judges and their référendaires
(McAuliffe 2012, pp. 203, 207) and (3) later translated, the judicial English
Eurolect may show features of translationese (a translator-mediated constrained
6 Lucja Biel et al.
form of language). Compared to EU legal aets and judgments from other juris­
dictions, EU judgments are under-researched. First attempts to describe English
language versions of CJEU judgments focused on selected distinctive lexico-
grammatical patterns used in argumentation, such as reporting verbs, in particular
the verb to hold (Mazzi 2007), concessions (Szczyrbak 2014), and paragraph­
initial metadiscursive signalling devices (McAuliffe and Trklja 2019). Some studies
point to the hybridity of CJEU English judgments compared to UK judgments:
increased formulaicity in terms of words in bundles (Trklja 2018) and marked
preference for certain complex prepositions (e.g. in accordance with, relating to-,
Kozbial 2018). Yet, to the best of our knowledge, no global analysis of the judi­
cial English Eurolect has been conducted to date, and we intend to fill this gap.

3 Corpus design
The study applies comparable corpus methods, supplemented with a qualitative
analysis of selected over- and under-represented lexico-grammatical patterns. It
was conducted on four large English-language corpora with the same ten-year
timeframe of 2010-2019 (calendar years, not judicial years). The CJEU focus
corpus includes two sub-corpora: CJ judgments and GC judgments. Two refer­
ence corpora are the corpus of UKSC judgments and the corpus of EU regula­
tions. The files were downloaded in 2020, uploaded to Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff
et al. 2014), part-of-speech tagged and lemmatised. Table 1.1 shows the corpus
design.
The CJEU corpus contains judgments downloaded automatically4 from Curia,5
with the search criteria limited to English-language judgments given in cases
closed. It covers both CJEU courts to account for the different types of cases
they hear.

Table 1.1 Corpus design

# of texts Tokens Average text Lexicon size: Lexicon size:

length words lemma_lc
Focus corpus: CJEU judgments
CJEU_CJ 3671 25,110,814 6840 100,711 67,904
CJEU-GC: 1184 17,655,295 14,911 72,451 45,381
Reference corpora
UKSC 669 9,989,448 14,931 73,603 45,156
EU.Reg 1080 12,490,190 11,564 160,324 88,179

4 xm!2: Parse XML, R 3.5.0, https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/xml2/

5 https://curia.europa.eu
 The judicial English Eurolect 7
The UKSC corpus comprises judgments issued by the UKSC which were
downloaded manually from its website.6 Doubled judgments dealing with mul­
tiple appeals were removed. The UKSC is the highest court of appeal for civil
and criminal cases from England, Wales, Northern Ireland and, in certain cases,
Scotland, hearing cases of general public and constitutional importance (Slap-
per and Kelly 2017, p. 243). Only 6% of the cases in the UKSC corpus deal
with criminal cases, the remaining ones being civil cases. The English common
law system applies the doctrine of a binding precedent (stare decisis), and the
UKSC judgments are binding on lower-ranking courts (Slapper and Kelly 2017,
pp. 137, 142).
The EU_Reg corpus includes regulations downloaded automatically from the
EUR-Lex7 directory of legal acts. The search was limited to basic acts in force,
excluding delegated, implementing and amending acts. We chose regulations as
the most prototypical type of EU secondary legislation: binding in their entirety
and directly applicable in the Member States. Regulations were downloaded in
full, including non-normative preambles, with citations and recitals.

4 Analysis of the judicial Eurolect: the genre profile

of CJEU judgments

4.1 Text length and lexical richness

Although the EU judicial drafting style has been described as “succinct” com­
pared to the common law style (see Section 1 ), the average text length (Table 1.1)
does not fully confirm this observation. While CJ judgments are indeed 2 times
shorter (6840 words) than UKSC ones (14,931), the length of GC judgments
(14,911) is nearly identical to that of UKSC judgments.
Another feature of CJEU judgments is their substantially lower lexicon size
compared to the UKSC corpus (Table 1.1). This is clearly visible in the GC
corpus, the lexicon size of which is similar to the UKSC corpus despite having
twice as many tokens. This means that the CJEU judgments are less lexically rich,
idiosyncratic and varied. These features, known as levelling out (Baker 1996,
p. 184), are hypothesised to be typical of translations. Yet, these processes might
be at play in the case of French originals as well, due to increased standardisation
in international institutions and possibly a higher thematic diversification of cases
at the national level.

4.2 Macrostructure of CJE Ujudgments

Table 1.2 shows the macrostructure of CJEU and UKSC judgments, their rhe­
torical moves and steps, depending on the procedure.

6 www.supremecourt.uk/
7 https://eur-lex.europa.eu
Table 1.2 Macrostructure of CJEU and UKSC judgments (abbreviations of direct actions: actions for annulment - A; actions for
damages - D; actions for failure to act - F; actions for failure to fulfil obligations - O; italics mark optional steps)

CJEU judgments UKSC judgments

Direct actions Appeals Preliminary

rulings

Move 1 Move 1 Identifying the

Identifying the case
case
Move 2 -w- 1 1• Move 2 Establishing facts
Identitvine the scone ot the proceedings
of the case
Move 3 Retrieving relevant EU Step 1 Relevant legal
or (inter)national law provisions and
(A, F, O) Retrieving relevant EU or ( international binding precedents
OR law
Stating the background
to the dispute (D)
Step 1 International law (O) — International law
Step 2 EU law (A, F, O)
Step 3 National law (O) — National law
Move 4 Stating the background Stating the Stating the Step 2 Regal questions
to the dispute (A, F, background to background to the
O), procedure and the dispute, the dispute and the
parties’ demands (A, D, judgment under questions referred
F,O) appeal, and
parties’ demands
Step 1 Background to the dispute (A, F, O) Step 3 Background to the
dispute
Step 2 Procedure and forms of Pre-litigation Question(s)
order sought (A, F) procedure referred for a
OR preliminary ruling
Pre-litigation procedure
(O)
Step 3 Forms of order sought (O) —
Move 5 Arguing the case Considering the Move 3 Arguing the case
question(s) referred
Step 1 Arguments of the parties (A, F, O) — Step 1 Arguments
Step 2 Findings of the Court (A, F, O) — Step 2 Ratio decidendi
Move 6 Settling costs Pronouncing
Move 4
Move 7 Pronouncing judgment judgment

Step 1 Judgment
Move 8 Signatures Step 2 Concurring/
dissenting opinions
10 Lucja Biel et al.
CJEU judgments exhibit a clear, sequential and standardised template-like
macrostructure. They are divided into numbered paragraphs (except for moves
1, 7 and 8), where move-step transitions are usually visually signalled with bold
section headings. CJEU judgments first identify the case and the scope of pro­
ceedings, then retrieve relevant legal provisions and state the background to the
dispute (informative moves 1-4). The argumentative move (5) argues the case
or considers the questions referred. The final moves (6-8) are performative: they
settle costs and pronounce the judgment (cf. Szczyrbak 2014, p. 127; Kozbial
2020). The largest variation is observable at moves 3, 4 and 5.
The macrostructure of UKSC judgments is also sequential but far less rigid due
to an increased idiosyncratic variation. Similarly, UKSC judgments are divided
into numbered paragraphs, but the move-step transitions are not signalled with
standardised headings. UKSC judgments typically start with informative moves
which identify the case and establish the facts of the case; the following moves
argue the case and pronounce the judgment (cf. Bhatia 1993, pp. 230-244). The
judgment may be accompanied by dissenting or concurring opinion(s). Although
the UKSC judgments have fewer and less pronounced moves and steps with
optional elements, the key moves - identifying the case, arguing the case, and
pronouncing the judgment - are shared and are functionally similar.

4.3 Keyword analysis: genre features

The keyword analysis identified a range of genre features related to the micro­
structure. For want of space, our discussion is limited to selected functional
categories:

• key terms and n-grams;

• parts of speech and grammatical categories;
• impersonal argumentative patterns;
• authorial presence;
• modal, reporting and performative verbs;
• proximity and distance;
• markers of evaluation and stance;
• textual metadiscourse;
• framing.

Tables in the subsequent part provide normalised frequencies (NF) per million
words (pmw) for selected patterns. The full data set, including raw frequen­
cies and %DIFF values, is available in RepOD at https://doi.org/10.18150/
JOQPG1, Biel et al. 2021.

4.4 Key terms and lexical bundles

Most frequent terms and lexical bundles reveal the key concepts behind the texts.
As shown in Table 1.3, simple terms are functionally similar across the corpora,
 The judicial English Eurolcct 11
Table 1.3 Top 10 single-word terms (items shared in judgments are in bold)

CJEU_CJ NF CJEU_GC NF UKSC NF EU_Reg NF

article 7639 commission 7717 court 4725 article 7207

court 6063 applicant 6221 case 4052 regulation 4691
directive 4133 decision 5278 section 2824 member 3345
paragraph 3659 article 4483 lord 2662 union 2633
member 3533 paragraph 4437 para 2508 commission 2361
regulation 3101 regulation 3103 act 2493 cc 2119
state 3092 case 2921 law 2386 authority 2070
law 2766 court 2692 appeal 2234 accordance 1998
judgment 2711 cu 1973 right 1920 state 1994
case 2479 infringement 1792 article 1889 product 1890

Table 1.4 Top 10 nested 4-grams

CJEU-CJ CJEU_GC UKSC EU_Reg

in the main of the contested the Court ofAppeal the European

proceedings decision the Secretary of Parliament and
State
for a preliminary in the present case Secretary of State referred to in article
ruling for
at issue in the the board of the House of Lords of the European
appeal Parliament
within the in the light of for the purposes of in accordance with
meaning of' article
issue in the main on the basis of in relation to the European
Parliament and of
the judgment in so far as in the case of Parliament and of
under appeal
on the basis of in the context of in the present case and of the Council
for the purposes of and the case-law v Secretary of State in accordance with
cited
in the light of in the contested of the court of of the European
decision Union
must be the fact that the of the Council of
interpreted as

attesting to the common conceptual basis, and include editing units (article,
paragraph/para), names of documents (directive, judgment, (legal) act), institu­
tions, participants (court, commission, member states, applicant), procedural ele­
ments (proceedings, case). Differences are more visible when terms refer to the
subject matter: appeal (UKSC), and product (EU_Reg).
Table 1.4 presents the top 10 nested 4-grams. These multi-word patterns show
less similarity across the corpora. Only judgments share a few top n-grams: on
the basis of, in the light of (CJ, GC), for the purposes of (CJ, UKSC) and in the
present case (GC, UKSC). Most top 4-grams are prepositional phrases or parts
12 Lucja Biel et al.
of larger noun phrases (rcquest/reference for a preliminary ruling; annulment/
adoption of the contested decision). Functionally, they are referential bundles ( the
Board of Appeal, the judgment under appeal) and text-oriented bundles (in the
light/context of for the purposes of. Table 1.4 has only one stance bundle (must
be interpreted as, CJ).

4.5 Parts of speech and selected grammatical categories

Using the Sketch Engine’s Modified TreeTagger POS tagset with some adjust­
ments, we analysed key parts of speech and grammatical categories (Table 1.5).
All judgments have a similar frequency of nouns, simple prepositions, conjunc­
tions and adjectives, which are significantly more frequent in regulations (e.g. the
or conjunction is 2-3 times more frequent); and determiners, which are less com­
mon in regulations. Additionally, judgments use more past tense verbs, adverbs,
nV;- and that subordinators and fewer gerunds compared to regulations; yet, these
categories are more similar in the GC and the UKSC compared to the CJ. On the
other hand, CJEU judgments have a similar distribution of verbs, modals, past
participles and personal pronouns, all of which are markedly more common in
the UKSC. The judicial and legislative Eurolects use fewer verbs but more phrasal
verbs (particle tag) and substantially more numerals than UKSC judgments.

Table 1.5 Key parts of speech and grammatical categories (figures in bold indicate
strong over-representation)

CJEU_CJ CJEU_GC UKSC EU_Reg

nouns 277,456 268,545 256,012 318,439

verbs 109,468 114,338 135,490 88,209
verb, past tense 11,314 19,925 26,245 4953
verb, gerund/present 15,812 13,243 12,134 17,688
participle
verb, past participle 29,908 30,618 32,886 27,523
modal 9497 9296 13,378 13,604
adjectives 55,195 55,204 57,393 66,179
adverbs 24,404 32,429 35,844 15,166
personal pronouns 13,928 18,188 29,817 6614
prepositions, 147,123 141,912 135,526 116,026
subordinating
conjunctions
coordinating 24,807 23,111 25,758 35,303
conjunctions
particles 2492 2161 1745 2409
that & irZz-subordinators 20,197 22,353 26,732 9066
ir/z-subordinators 9182 6780 12,194 5876
that as subordinator 11,015 15,573 14,538 3190
determiners 115,432 120,495 114,899 84,591
numerals 52,503 52,527 29,909 54,772
 The judicial English Eurolcct 13
4.6 Impersonal argumentative patterns
Compared to regulations, one of the distinctive features of judgments is the per­
vasive use of impersonal argumentative patterns (Table 1.6), parts of which can
be easily identified in keywords and n-grams (e.g. it over-represented in GC and
UKSC judgments; existential there and hedges seem, appear over-represented in
UKSC judgments).

Table 1.6 Frequent argumentative patterns

CJEU_CJ CJEU_GC UKSC EU_Reg

6327 9371 9634 1823

it [modal] be [verb-passive] 874 1518 232 106
CJ/GC: it must/should be - noted,
recalled, held, borne in mind,
observed, pointed out, etc.
UKSC: it would/may be - said, noted,
seen
Reg: it shall/should be - prohibited
it * be noted 258 399 13
it [verb|modal+be\ [adjective] 1076 1437 1496 332
- it is/was | would/must be apparent,
necessary, clear, true, common,
important, possible, appropriate, etc.
z'r * apparent from/that 341 451 38 1
it * necessary 165 227 126 90
it follows from/that 398 452 31 1
there EX 543 814 2382 251
there [verb|modal+be\ 415 620 1567 171
[ determiner/noun ]
~ is/are/was/were (a/no/any/
nothing) doubt, reason, question,
evidence, grounds, need, suggestion,
question, etc.
seem patterns 21 331
it/this/that seems would/does not
seem (UKSC: to me) that | infinitive
[to be, to have been) adjective
Yawn1, clear, likely, reasonable)
appear [to, that, adj] patterns 78 72 291 18
zr/noun appears does not appear
that infinitive to be, have, suggest)
adjective ( necessary, appropriate,
possible, clear)
14 Lucjci Biel et al.
There is a relatively high similarity among CJEU judgments in how they use
the aforementioned patterns both in terms of preferences, variant forms and col­
locates. CJEU judgments more frequently use the pattern It [modal] be [verb­
passive] (mainly with strong modals must and should) and it follows from/that.
UKSC judgments more frequently use there [verb] [determiner/noun] and hedg­
ing seem/appear patterns. The it [verb] [adjective] pattern has a similarly high
distribution in the GC and UKSC judgments, yet the most frequent realisation
of this pattern in CJEU judgments is zi is apparent from/that (with a range of
variants, e.g. it is/was/becomes (not/also/furthermore/clearly/therefore) apparent
from/that), nearly 10 times more frequent than in UKSC judgments.

4.7 Authorial presence

One of the most striking differences in the CJEU and UKSC keywords is the use
of first-person pronouns, which signal judges’ authorial presence through self­
references (Table 1.7).
The UKSC judgments show a very strong over-representation of the first-
person pronouns I and we, whereby judges express their stance, judgment and
concurring and dissenting opinions: in my/our view, in my opinion, I agree (with),
I (do not) think, I/we consider that, we are concerned with. Self-references are
occasionally depersonalised (e.g. the Court is divided; the Court is being asked to).
The UKSC judgments also frequently refer to honorifics and titles: Mr., Lord,
Lady, Sir. The high distribution of personal pronouns combined with the more
vivid, metaphorical and emotional language of UKSC judgments contribute to
their dialogicity and more personal nature.
By sharp contrast, CJEU judgments are highly depersonalised and of a clearly
signalled collegiate nature, resembling in this regard more the French than the
UK drafting style. By using the third-person collective self-reference the Court
*(e.g. the Court should, rules, held, considers), the judges never become visible,
neither through the first-person pronoun (which appears only in direct quotes
from other documents, mostly witness testimonies) nor by dissenting or con­
curring opinions. This de-individualisation was aptly captured by Bobek: “judi­
cial individuality is suppressed. . . . No individual judicial faces emerge from the

Table 1.7 Authorial presence: self-references

CJEU_CJ CJEU_GC UKSC EU_Reg

1 3 50 2360
we 2 34 558
Court’s proper name: 666 568 141 n/a
CJ, GC, SC or COURT
the/this Court* 1679 1443 281 n/a
Note: the/this Court* is an approximation; it includes some references to other courts.
 The judicial English Eurolect 15
collegiate court, at least in the judicial capacity” (2015, p. 166). Judges become a
unanimous and anonymous voice of the institution, which creates the impression
of objective impersonal authority behind the judgment. In this respect, CJEU
judgments are similar to regulations, devoid of first-person pronouns.

4.8 Modal, reporting and performative verbs

Another salient keyword category comprises the verb group, under-represented
in the Eurolect. As for modal and semi-modal verbs, judgments tend to use them
to express epistemic modality in reported speech and citations, while regulations
use them to express deontic modality (obligation and permission) in normative
parts. As shown in Table 1.8, each corpus has its own preferred modals: the
CJEU - must, the UKSC - would and regulations - shall.
There are marked differences in the use of modals between CJEU and UKSC
judgments. CJEU judgments have ca. 30% fewer modals, frequently use a strong
modal wzoTand use fewer conditional forms. The CJ and the GC have a relatively
similar distribution of modals, but the GC has more could, would and should since
they often rely on reported speech, while the CJ has more shall and may, as they
cite relevant legal provisions more extensively than the GC.
Must, one of the top CJEU keywords, triggered in translation by a wide
range of French patterns, is strongly over-represented in CJEU judgments
compared to both UKSC and regulations. It is used in highly repetitive argu­
mentative patterns, mainly to signal logical necessity: must be interpreted
(CJ: 491 pmw), the plea (in law), complaint or argument must (*/therefore/also/
accordingly) be rejected (GC: 406 pmw), must * be held. This strong modal, often
combined with the agentless passive voice, signals an impersonal authority behind
the argumentation, making it more objective and hence less contestable. The UKSC
judgments have much more varied and less frequent patterns with must: must be
taken, the court must, etc. They more frequently use a weaker modal should and
semi-modals (periphrastic modals) be to and have to (e.g. is to be found in).

Table 1.8 Modal auxiliary verbs and semi-modals

CJEU_CJ CJEU_GC UKSC EU.Reg

must 2584 2709 1178 324

have to 178 256 524 69
be to 845 684 1041 268
shall 1739 328 476 8182
should 1080 1481 1784 2062
may 1576 974 1635 1830
can 1058 1237 1671 538
could 412 802 1196 128
might 98 193 648 52
would 674 1142 3464 210
16 Lucya Biel et al.
Finally, CJEU judgments have markedly fewer conditional forms of modals,
such as would, could, might, which are over 2-3 times more frequent in UKSC
judgments. They express logical possibility and prediction and appear in reported
speech. They may be combined with (/hypothetical structures, twice as frequent
in UKSC judgments (2530 pmw) as in CJEU judgments (1223; 937) and regula­
tions (1164). Conditional modals also function as hedging devices, toning down
the strength of the utterance. Interestingly, this is clearly visible in the operative
part, where CJEU judgments use the standardised formula in the present simple
tense accompanied by the solemn performative hereby (absent in the French ver­
sions; added in translations):

On those grounds, the Court hereby rules [preliminary rulings

On those grounds, the Court hereby: 1. Declares 2. Dismisses 3. Orders [direct
actions],

whereas the UKSC operative parts are far more varied and personalised, quite
frequently hedged with a conditional modal:

For these reasons I would dismiss the appeal.

Accordingly, albeit without enthusiasm, I would allow the appeal.
We therefore dismiss the appeals.

The above examples show the most frequent performative verbs in the Pronounc­
ing the Judgment move dismisses, annuls, orders, declares and rules in CJEU judg­
ments and ¿/«WMsand allow in UKSC judgments.
Another prominent group of verbs can be broadly referred to as reporting
verbs, as they report on actions and attitudes, including self-references. They
mainly appear in third-person singular {contends, submits, claims, considers, dis­
putes') and the third-person past tense forms {held, stated, considered, found,
observed, submitted-, Table 1.9), with quite a lot of forms (in brackets) shared
among the top 10 verbs in CJEU and UKSC judgments. Present tense forms
occasionally appear in the third-person plural (e.g. the applicants submit) and

Table 1.9 Top reporting verbs: past forms

CJEU_CJ CJEU_GC UKSC EU.Reg

held 270 stated 285 said 543 issued 8

stated 122 considered 179 held 238 claimed 5
failed 106 found 164 considered 127 submitted 5
found 83 held 133 agreed 115 accepted 5
decided 76 failed 129 observed 114 decided 4
 The judicial English Eurolect 17
in the first person in UKSC only (e.g. I/we consider, accept). UKSC keywords
include more conversational said and .vzw forms.

4.9 Proximity and distance

The concluding formulas show an interesting difference in the use of proximal
and distant determiners (e.g. on those grounds (CJEU),/or these reasons (UKSC);
Table 1.10). UKSC judgments have a similar distribution of both types of deter­
miners. CJEU judgments have a strong preference for the distant determiners
that and those, which are seven to eight times more frequent than their proxi­
mal determiners this and these (and twice as frequent as distant determiners in
the UKSC). This creates an impression of detachment and distance. The over­
representation is partly due to phrases: in that regard (the UKSC prefers in this
regard), (see) to that effect, that directive, in those circumstances, on those grounds.
It may be a side effect of translation, as the French simple determiners ce(t), cette,
ces do not correspond to the English set of proximal and distant determiners.
In other words, a cet égard can be translated both as in this regard and in that
regard, depending on the context. Curiously, it is the latter set of markers that is
triggered in translation rather than the former. The preference for distant deter­
miners is not observed in the regulations.
Other distancing devices due to their immediate associations with formal reg­
ister and legalese are compound prepositions with here* (hereby, hereinafter) and
there* (thereof, thereby, thereto, therein). They are strongly over-represented in the
Eurolect, in particular in CJ judgments and regulations.

Table 1.10 Proximity and distance markers

CJEU-CJ CJEU_GC UKSC EU_Reg

1. Proximal determiners
this 1331 944 4504 3576
these 270 155 1131 304
Total 1601 1099 5635 3880
2. Distant determiners
that 8458 6682 4504 1492
those 2994 2647 1226 1207
Total 11,452 9329 5730 2699
3. Compound prepositions
here* compounds 172 75 22 75
hereby 152 70 10 31
there* compounds 528 262 161 559
thereof 329 111 21 366
18 Lucja Biel et al.
4.10 Markers of evaluation and epistemic stance: adverbials
and adjectives
Another key feature of judgments is the ubiquitous use of markers of evaluation
and epistemic stance, which is communicated with a range of devices: adverbials
(in particular -ly adverbials), adjectives, nouns, conjunctions (e.g. a CJEU key­
word: in so far as), determiners and boosters (every, never, often, which are UKSC
keywords), and the modal verbs discussed above. Table 1.11 shows the most
frequent evaluation and stance adverbials, with clearly and likely being shared in
all the corpora. These adverbials are much more frequent in judgments, in par­
ticular in the UKSC and GC judgments. The most common adverbials are quite
similar in judgments, and they are predominantly high-level epistemic markers
(clearly, actually, expressly, in fact, indeed, necessarily, merely, reasonably, simply) or
hedge the content with a small (in essence, in principle, essentially,generally, more
prominent in CJ judgments) or larger (likely) margin of doubt. UKSC keywords
include the more conversational indeed, simply and of course. Adjectives, which
are under-represented in judgments, are surprisingly similar across the corpora,
with as many as five top adjectives shared.

Table 1.11 Top evaluation and stance adverbials (excluding organisational markers)
and adjectives

CJEU_CJ NF CJEU_GC NF UKSC NF EU_Reg NF

Adverbials
in essence 254 in essence 255 indeed 274 75
in principle 151 merely 228 simply 222 likely 73
actually 128 indeed 170 clearly 200 clearly 64
merely 117 clearly 150 reasonably 177 principally 31
expressly 113 in fact 136 properly 174 generally 28
likely 101 likely 129 generally 173 properly 26
essentially 93 expressly 128 merely 145 actually 25
in fact 92 actually 127 in fact 136 reasonably 21
indeed 86 necessarily 122 necessarily 133 substantially 20
clearly 88 correctly 109 likely 129 notably 18
Adjectives
necessary 751 contested 3201 relevant 902 relevant 1093
appropriate 423 relevant 696 necessary 602 appropriate 766
relevant 400 necessary 660 clear 534 necessary 702
contested 384 apparent 486 reasonable 454 possible 331
apparent 369 sufficient 405 appropriate 377 significant 185
possible 318 clear 397 possible 336 sufficient 134
clear 305 possible 368 sufficient 234 essential 113
sufficient 218 appropriate 347 great 228 potential 100
essential 143 alleged 242 significant 222 adequate 93
unfair 130 manifest 202 correct 221 serious 88
 The judicial English Eurolect 19
4.11 Textual metadiscourse
Compared to legal acts, judgments are characterised by the pervasive use of
markers that organise discourse, ensure cohesion and guide readers through the
text. They include linking adverbials, which link ideas between sentences, and
conjunctions, which link ideas between clauses. The most frequent metadiscur-
sive devices in judgments can be divided into the following functional groups:
(1) inference, (2) addition, (3) apposition, (4) contrast and concession and (5)
cause (Table 1.12).

Table 1.12 Organisational markers

CJEU_CJ CJEU_GC UKSC EU.Reg

Inference
therefore 677 1222 638 255
thus 413 564 316 52
consequently 309 419 24 23
accordingly 246 351 171 83
then* 93 111 511 70
Addition
yinr 326 551 161 0
moreover 258 539 72 31
furthermore 197 377 58 57
secondly; second 329 589 173 2
in addition 158 302 37 76
finally 87 143 77 14
next 70 131 66 2
in the first place 62 133 34 0
lastly 57 149 3 0
further 59 92 183 117
And 1 1 105
Apposition
such as 817 310 366 316
in particular, particularly 862 875 417 617
namely 206 341 183 38
that is to say, that is, i.e., it 117 161 153 76
for example, for instance, eg., eg 51 72 322 214
Contrast and concession
however 601 717 830 195
but 554 655 2738 400
But 0 1 915 2
while 188 177 277 113
although 180 276 472 20
even if 129 203 200 20
nevertheless 102 104 111 20
though 89 117 134 9
on the other hand 85 97 88 8
20 Lucjci Biel et al.
Table 1.12 (Continued)
CJEU-CJ CJEU_GC UKSC EU_Reg
otherwise 84 46 287 147
even though 83 112 66 5
still 69 96 154 34
Cause
because 149 212 795 44

The GC corpus has significantly more inference markers (over 50% more than
the CJ and the UKSC) and addition markers (two times more than the CJ and
three times more than the UKSC). CJEU judgments, in particular the CJ, have
25%-45% more apposition markers, which clarify, exemplify or reformulate the
item preceding it. Compared to the CJEU corpus, UKSC judgments have twice
as many contrast/concession markers, often used in argumentation to introduce a
counterclaim (cf. Szczyrbak 2014), and four times more occurrences of the cause
marker because. Thus, CJEU judgments more clearly and frequently sequence
arguments, while UKSC judgments more actively shift arguments and introduce
counterclaims. Significantly more frequent markers in the CJEU are consequently,
first, second, moreover, furthermore and namely, while the UKSC-preferred mark­
ers are then (both inference and addition), further, for example, however, otherwise,
although and but, in particular the conversational sentence-initial But and And
(virtually non-existent in CJEU judgments).

4.12 Latinisms
The next feature of judgments is the use of Latinisms, which shows a relative
similarity across the judicial corpora (Table 1.13). CJEU judgments have a similar

Table 1.13 Top Latinisms

CJEU_CJ NF CJEU_GC NF UKSC NF EU.Reg NF

inter alia 418 inter alia 247 212 ex 405

per 76per 83 in re 133 per 223
via 30 via 31 ex 95 eg, eg. 116
res judicata 21 a fortiori 28 ie, i.e. 93 etc., etc 96
mutatis mutandis 15 indicia 25 eg, eg. 62 via 93
de facto 13 de facto 21 inter alia 39 quantum satis 72
a fortiori 13 ex 21 prima facie 37 ie, i.e. 70
in rem 12 prima facie 14 defacto 32 inter alia 60
ratione temporis 11 ad hoc 13 etc., etc 30 de minimis 32
ex 10 res judicata 12 ex parte 15 mutatis mutandis 18
via 15
 The judicial English Eurolect 21
number of Latinisms to UKSC judgments in terms of types; but 10%-20% fewer
Latinisms in terms of total distribution. Regulations have fewer types but these
have a higher distribution compared to judgments (from ca. 700 pmw in the GC
to 1300 in regulations). Top Latinisms are either discourse organisers used for
clarification and exemplification {inter alia, etc., eg., i.e.) or prepositions {per,
via, ex). In this group, inter alia is strongly over-represented in CJEU judg­
ments. Lower-ranking Latinisms refer to legal concepts or maxims, capitalising
on shared pan-European knowledge of Latin among legal professionals, especially
continental ones.

4.13 Framing: complex and marginal prepositions

This group focuses on complex and marginal prepositions which frame the con­
tent and argumentation. They have a similar distribution in the Eurolect, where
they are strongly over-represented (50%-70%) compared to UKSC judgments.
Table 1.14 shows the most frequent complex prepositions, with two shared
prepositions {in order to, in accordance with), while Table 1.15 groups them
functionally.
Although they are multifunctional, top prepositions are used mainly to frame
discourse with inter- and intratextual references, legal authority and conflict
avoidance/resolution, purpose, particularisation and anchoring. CJEU judg­
ments use two to three times more prepositions in each of these categories.
A majority of complex prepositions in Table 1.15 are strongly over-represented
in CJEU judgments compared to UKSC, in particular as regards, relating to, con­
cerning, according to, in accordance with and in order to.

Table 1.14 Top complex and marginal prepositions in each corpus

CJEU.CJ CJEU_GC UKSC EU.Reg

in accordance with according to as to in accordance with

in respect of relating to in relation to including
relating to as regards subject to excluding
according to concerning in respect of in order to
in order to in order to for the purpose (s) of pursuant to
for the purpose (s) of in accordance with in order to subject to
concerning in the light of in accordance with for the purpose (s) of
within the meaning of on the basis of relating to other than
as regards in the context of out of concerning
subject to in respect of in the case of on the basis of
22 Lucja Biel et al.
Table 1.15 Top complex prepositions according to functions

CJEU_CJ CJEU_GC UKSC EU_Reg

Inter- and intratextual references
in accordance with 882 536 252 1995
according to 709 871 125 207
within the meaning of 586 292 107 103
on the basis of 475 481 112 312
pursuant to 384 353 118 598
subject to 555 230 404 467
in the light of* 441 508 177 3 (3
Particularisation and anchoring
in respect of 746 418 399 229
relating to 712 833 214 283
concerning 599 679 77 383
as regards 572 829 46 151
as to 390 378 762 136
in relation to 246 306 582 185
in the context of 236 427 146 67
in the case of 161 119 202 233
Purpose
in order to 691 671 278 709
for the purpose (s) of 641 409 359 425

5 Conclusions
This study is the first comprehensive attempt to profile the judicial variety of the
English Eurolect. It contributes to the growing body of research on Eurolects by
confirming the existence of the judicial English Eurolect with its unique hybrid
style and providing descriptive corpus data on its hybridisation.
The study has identified the following distinctive genre features shared by
CJEU and UKSC judgments: a macrostructure with a relatively similar organi­
sation of informative, argumentative and performative moves and a similar
conceptual background formed by top single-word terms and adjectives from
functionally similar categories. At the microstructural level, the most salient fea­
tures of judgments include argumentative patterns, interpersonal metadiscourse
(authorial presence markers, epistemic modality, evaluation and stance mark­
ers), textual metadiscourse, reporting and performative verbs, Latinisms and
framing with complex prepositions. More specifically, compared to regulations,
judgments use more verbs, in particular past tense verbs, personal pronouns,
determiners, adverbs, simple prepositions and subordinators, as well as fewer
nouns, coordinating conjunctions, adjectives and gerunds.
However, the corpus data reveal marked differences between CJEU and
UKSC judgments on many levels, pointing to their distinct styles. First, CJEU
 The judicial English Eurolect 2 3
judgments have a much more rigid, template-like macrostructure with clearly
signalled move-step transitions. The structural rigidness accompanied by exten­
sive “cluster citations” “enhances the sensation of ‘inevitability’ as to the results
reached” by the CJEU (Bobek 2015, p. 170), in particular when combined with
other microstructural features which foreground impartiality and power. These
features include (1) a depersonalised and collegiate authorial presence (the Court)
with third-person verbs, as compared to the ubiquitous personal pronouns I and
we in UKSC judgments; (2) an over-representation of the strong modal must
together with a much lower use of other modals, in particular weaker conditional
hedging modals (would, might)-, (3) the frequent use of depersonalised argumen­
tative patterns (it [modal] be [verb], it * apparent, it follows, and a rare use of
hedging verbs seem and appear)-, (4) a strong preference for distant determiners
(that, those), which create an impression of detachment and distance; (5) the for­
mal performative hereby, (6) the frequent use of evaluation and stance adverbials,
which mainly communicate high-level epistemicity or hedge the content; (7) the
more active use of textual metadiscursive devices, which sequence or exemplify
arguments (inference, addition, apposition) and a significantly lower use of more
confrontational contrast/concession devices and cause markers; (8) significantly
more complex and marginal prepositions framing content with inter- and intra­
references, purpose and particularisation/anchoring, which (when combined
with (9), significantly more numerals) imply increased precision. These features
create an impression of impersonal, impartial and rational authority behind the
judgment, signal its distance and power, and hence impose judgments and make
them less contestable. Other CJEU-specific features include lower lexical rich­
ness, ca. 20% fewer verbs (in particular past tense verbs), adverbs and subordina-
tors, which when combined with the frequent use of complex prepositions reduce
their dynamicity and increase analytic constructions, which may be a side effect
of translation. Certain features, such as fewer verbs, but more phrasal verbs, more
complex prepositions and numerals, are shared by all Eurolect corpora, including
regulations. Against this background, UKSC judgments seem much more per­
sonal, dynamic, conversational, hypothetical and subjective.
Finally, despite these similarities, our data demonstrate that CJEU judgments
show a considerable internal variation, which may be attributed to different
types of cases dealt with by the GC and the CJ. With respect to a range of fea­
tures, GC judgments are more similar to UKSC than CJ judgments, in particu­
lar, they have an identical average length (CJ judgments being twice as short);
use more adverbs and past tense verbs due to an increased reliance on reported
speech; it [verb] [adjective] argumentative pattern; and fewer gerunds. Addi­
tionally, GC judgments have more personal pronouns, subordinators, deter­
miners, more occurrences of the hypothetical modal would, significantly more
inference and addition markers, and 20% more contrast/concession markers.
On the other hand, CJ judgments have more distant determiners, the per­
formative hereby and other formal here- and there- compounds, as well as
ca. 25% more complex preposition with inter- and intratextual framing. Thus,
further studies into the judicial Eurolect could account for the different types
24 Lucia Biel et al.
of cases dealt with by the CJ and the GC, separating preliminary rulings, direct
actions and appeals at the corpus design phase to better understand their inter­
nal variation.
This study lays the groundwork for future research into the judicial variety of
the EU English Eurolect, as well as other judicial Eurolects and their linguistic
distance to the Member States’ national judicial styles, which seems to be a prom­
ising area for further work. As a final note, this study raises the question of how
such distances impact the reception and interpretation of hybrid judicial texts, as
well as attitudes towards CJEU case law.

Acknowledgement
We wish to thank Marcin Wilkowski from the Digital Competence Centre of the
University of Warsaw for harvesting files for the CJEU and EU_Reg corpora.

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2 Evidentiality in US Supreme
Court opinions
Focus on passive structures
with say and tell
Magdalena Szczyrbak

1 Introduction
Judicial opinions differ in many ways from other types of discursive or persuasive
prose (Garner 1995, p. 621). What differentiates them from other kinds of legal
writing is that they conform to judges’ “notions of what justice dictates” (Garner
1995, p. 621), or, as some believe, their intuitive sense of what is right or wrong
(Frank 1930). This holds true also for opinions issued by the Supreme Court of
the United States, addressing some of the most fundamental problems of soci­
ety and presenting the Court’s final determination based on legal reasoning and
judicial philosophy. Seen from a linguistic perspective, the Court’s argumentation
accommodates not only disciplinary values and practices but also the “judge-like”
expression of epistemic modality and evidentiality, or, put differently, it is reflec­
tive of the judicial “mode of thought” and “mode of knowing” (Chafe 1986).
As demonstrated in earlier studies on stance-related and evaluative strategies
inherent in judicial opinion writing, judges prefer certain phraseologies which
reveal the beliefs and disciplinary values of the judicial community (Gozdz-
Roszkowski and Pontrandolfo 2013). It has also been shown that recurrent
semantic sequences provide useful “entry points” into the study of the judicial
argumentative style (Gozdz-Roszkowski 2018, p. 158). It has likewise been
noted that various aspects of lexical choice, among other linguistic resources,
determine the degree of personality or impersonality in the text and “project
the epistemological premises of the discipline and the value system that oper­
ates within it” (Breeze 2011, p. 94). Specifically, it has been found that certain
high-frequency adjectives and adverbs, together with their semantic preferences,
embody values held by the legal community and convey attributes and qualities,
such as reasonableness, that have particular importance in the field of law (Breeze
2011, p. 94).
With that in mind, this chapter draws attention to reporting verbs which -
like stance-denoting nouns, adjectives and adverbs - are the building blocks of
judicial narrative and which are central to the construction of judicial voice and
authority. While the relevance of reporting verbs to legal writing in general has
been recognised in earlier work (Breeze 2017, 2018), the study reported here

DOI: 10.4324/9781003153771-3
 Evidentiality in US Supreme Court opinions 27
focuses on a single genre. Its aim is to trace long-term trends in the use of it is
said (that) and the present-tense variants of the BE said to and BE told (that)
constructions, and to demonstrate their evidential and discourse-organising role
in judicial opinions.

2 Evidentiality and passive structures with

reporting verbs
Little need be said about the attention that evidentiality has attracted in recent
linguistics scholarship. Some describe it as a grammatical category subsuming a
finite number of markers indicating information source in languages in which
evidential coding is obligatory (Aikhenvald and Dixon 2014), whereas those
studying languages which lack grammaticalised evidentiality adopt a broader view
(Mushin 2001) and define it as a functional category which refers to “the per­
ceptual and/or epistemological basis for making a speech act” (Cornillie 2009,
p. 45). In the latter approach, evidential marking includes functional, lexical and
nonverbal devices as well as implicit references to evidentiality realised in the form
of salient discourse patterns (Fetzer 2014, p. 336). It should also be noted that
a conceptual differentiation is commonly made between epistemic modality and
evidentiality, where “the former refers to a category in which some hypotheti­
cal state of affairs is indexed and evaluated”, while “the latter refers to a visual,
sensorial, hearsay or inferential mode of knowing” (Fetzer 2014, p. 333). Put
differently, it is argued that “evidential expressions indicate that there are reasons
for the assumption made by the speaker and epistemic expressions evaluate that
assumption” (Cornillie 2009, p. 57).
Against this background, passive structures with reporting verbs, represent­
ing hearsay evidentiality, have been shown to play a role in marking information
source (Noël and van der Auwera 2009; Breeze 2017). The passive voice itself
has been the subject of the ongoing debate on the use of impersonal structures
in scientific writing which, like judicial discourse, is largely expected to show
emotional neutrality, impartiality and objectivity (Gross et al. 2002). The passive
construction has also been discussed in studies focusing on the verb phrase and
recent language change, pointing to a decline in the use of BE-passives in certain
registers (including general prose and academic writing) and the concurrent rise
in GET-passives, especially in general prose and fiction (Smith and Leech 2013).
As regards specifically formal written genres, passivised structures with report­
ing verbs have been noted to redistribute information within the sentence, to
mark thematic progression, to avoid repetition and, most importantly, to give
credence to the author’s claims without specifying their source (Breeze 2017).
In agreement with this, the constructions it is said (that), BE said to and BE told
(that) give a semblance of objectivity to the writer’s assertions, although they are
linked to an unnamed source. Likewise, in its evidential use, BE expected to calls
in “an unspecified source, from whose implied existence the relative factuality of
the statement can be inferred” (Noël 2001, p. 270), and mindsay BE supposed
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