35.1783, Review: The Digital (R)Evolution of Legal Discourse: Anesa and Engberg (eds.) (2023)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1783. Mon Jun 17 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.1783, Review: The Digital (R)Evolution of Legal Discourse: Anesa and Engberg (eds.) (2023)

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Date: 18-Jun-2024
From: Brett Drury [brett.drury at gmail.com]
Subject: Forensic Linguistics: Anesa and Engberg (eds.) (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.2841

EDITOR: Patrizia Anesa
EDITOR: Jan Engberg
TITLE: The Digital (R)Evolution of Legal Discourse
SUBTITLE: New Genres, Media, and Linguistic Practices
SERIES TITLE: Foundations in Language and Law
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Brett Drury

SUMMARY

The legal process combines testimony, documents, oral arguments, as
well written judgments. And because law is often the codification of
custom and practise, recorded judgments stretch back into the mists of
time, and provide a ready-made corpus for researchers to infer legal
culture and examine shifting legal preferences through time.

“The Digital (R)Evolution of Legal Discourse”, published by De
Gruyter, is a diverse selection of texts that analyse all things
legal. The book seems is aimed at a general audience who have at least
passing knowledge of basic linguistic concepts and/or an interest in
the legal domain.

The book is split into nine chapters, with the first chapter,
“Investigating legal discourse in the digital landscape” (Anesa and
Endberg), effectively motivating the study of legal linguistics as
well as describing the layout and motivation of the book.

The first chapter proper is “Contract Macro-divisions and the Digital
Age” (Lavissière), which the chapter explains are headings within a
contract. A heading in a contract is an indicator of grouped clauses
and terms within a contract. It is reasonable to assume that there
should be a direct connection between the heading and the following
content. The chapter describes several research questions, including
the limitation of the study to maritime contracts, which by definition
can be international, with various issues such as the supremacy of
laws that need to be considered. The corpus selected by the author was
relatively small, with sixty-one individual contracts, but with
republications there was a total of 651, which spanned forty-eight
years. The main area of study was the change in headings in the
republications through the years and a hierarchical clustering of the
contracts themselves. The chapter has some discussion about changes in
article content over time and an overview of agreement authority. The
conclusions were not unexpected, as maritime contracts tend to be
stable over time because their motivations of maritime trade and
passage tend to be immune to the passing of time.

The computational processing of legal judgments inevitably leads to
the handling of personal information. This is the subject of the next
chapter “Processing of Personal Data in Court Proceedings: A Model for
Linguistic and Legal Studies” (Clemenzi et al)., which provides an
annotation and anonymisation of such data in documents from the
Italian court system. The authors discuss issues of traditional
anonymisation, where personally identifiable information is simply
removed from documents, and discuss an alternative, which is
pseudonymisation, which substitutes this information with a pseudonym
or a simple code. The authors then propose a method of semi-automatic
pseudonymisation, which involves an annotator locating the personal
information, which is replaced automatically by the requisite text.
The rest of the chapter describes further elements of the annotation
system, such as search.

The next three chapters are loosely grouped around legal
communication. The three main themes are the self-portrayal of legal
specialists on German and Italian websites (Lombardi and Lutterman),
stance features in legal blogging (Dani) and “Internet as a Game
Changer in legal communication: Arbitration on the Move” (Greineder
and Stein). Legal communication is arguably an important part of the
legal process, as this shapes the perception of legal professionals,
as well as acting as a vehicle for legal actors to communicate legal
arguments to the courts as well as the wider public. Various blogs are
run by legal professionals, such as The Secret Barrister, and
therefore can represent the opinion of the larger legal community.

The Lombardi and Lutterman chapter is focused on the representation of
legal professionals in boutique law firms. Boutique law firms are
highly specialised  small law firms. The chapter proposes three main
areas of inquiry: communication formats, such as the presentation of
the person’s professional history, as in a CV or Bio, the influence of
the website itself on the recruitment and marketing of legal
professionals, and finally the categories of professionals the
individuals fall into as portrayed by their external marketing. The
authors found that the main form of representation was a hybrid of a
CV and a third-person description of the lawyer’s career. A standalone
CV and first-person biography were rare in their corpus. There were
little cultural differences between the representation of Italian or
German lawyers.

Stance features are linguistic and stylistic features that can be used
to identify the author's position or attitude towards a particular
topic or issue, and with the growth of user-generated legal content
they are useful for identifying opinions of bloggers towards specific
legal topics. However whether these opinions are informed is up for
debate because of the low entry barrier to producing blogs. This
chapter is a small-scale study: ninety-six posts over a period from
2012 to 2017, from two legal blog sites.  Lombardi and Lutterman limit
their study to posts produced by US / UK-affiliated law lecturers. The
small number of blogs, and the exclusion of legal professionals,
indicate that the stance features will not cover the general legal
domain. The authors rely upon Hyland’s stance features, which are:
hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions. The overview
frequency of these features in the corpus is 10.26 words per thousand
for hedges, 2.26 words per thousand for boosters, 1.87 and 1.35 words
per thousand for attitude markers and self-mentions respectively. The
authors then discuss each type of stance feature in-depth, providing
examples of the most frequent words within each category, with some
commentary, as well as examples of the phenomenon that the author is
describing. Ultimately, the authors argue that the rhetorical style as
personified by stance features helps position the blogger within the
legal community.

The third chapter, “Internet as a Game Changer in legal communication:
Arbitration on the Move” (Greineder and Stein), is an investigation of
the media’s influence upon legal communication.

The next two chapters, “Linguistic Markers of Participation in
International Criminal Trials” (Nikitina) and “Making National
Immigration and Asylum Case Law Accessible to a Non-Italian Auidence”
(Peruzzo and Scarpa) are loosely based on legal participation. This
subject is a popular area of debate, as it pertains to legal rights
and mechanisms that enable individuals and groups to engage in the
decision-making processes. Legal systems that have poor participation
are arguably denying justice to their populace. The first chapter is a
discussion of linguistic markers of participation in international
criminal trials. This chapter is an analysis of a single case at the
International Criminal Court. The chapter relies upon Goffman’s
participation framework, which is a recognition of an individual’s
status based upon their ability to participate in a communication
event. The chapter focuses on listeners, which the author groups into
three categories: unratified unaddressed, ratified unaddressed, and
ratified addressed. The author provides some details about the study,
the tools used, and the characteristics of the corpus, which contains
forty-five transcripts representing each distinct part of the trial.
The chapter provides a descriptive analysis of the participation of
remote individuals as well as the defendants. The author also provides
a table of variants of terms referring to these individuals. These
terms were combinations of title and first name and last name, as well
as general terms such as Defendant or Defendants. The author compares
the terms of reference for the accused to those for the institutional
parties such as judges and lawyers. These terms were more formal. The
next two sections discuss the addressing of witnesses and
interpreters. Due to the severity of the alleged crime, many witnesses
were allowed to give evidence anonymously, and therefore the
references were impersonal. The examples given by the author were
Witness, Witnesses, and Mr Witness. The interpreters were also
addressed in an impersonal way, with terms such as Interpreter. In
each section, there is a discussion about the use of the terms, which
are illustrated with examples. The chapter finishes with a summary of
its findings, which were: limited variation in the addressing of the
institutional actors, interpreters having some recognition in court
proceedings, and defendants having the most variation in the mode of
address.

The next chapter, “Making National Immigration and Asylum Case Law
Accessible to a Non-Italian Audience”,  discusses the accessibility of
immigration law through the use of intralingual translation. The main
thrust of this chapter was the translation of a subset of Italian case
law into English and the distribution of the translations. The chapter
describes the mechanics of translating Italian legal text into
English, which involves a pre-translation phase, and a description of
terminology and phraseology.

The final chapter, “Screening the law; Popularization practises in
‘How To Get Away With Murder’” (Buniatova.) is a discussion of the
mass media and in particular an individual show, “How to Get Away with
Murder”, on the perception of the day-to-day life of law students. The
chapter discusses the racial breakdown of the class, as well as the
unrealistic depiction of the exclusion of students who did not have a
“passion” for the law. The author spends some of the chapter
discussing further unrealistic representations of law students. The
rest of the chapter is spent discussing the representation of a female
lawyer/professor of colour. In common with some of the other chapters,
this chapter is descriptive.

EVALUATION

The diverse nature of the subject material did impede its natural
flow, and even with the sub-groupings, there seemed to be a jolt as
the reader finished one chapter and started another. Some of the
chapters had their limitations, which impacted the readability of the
book.

Although the Lombardi and Lutermann chapter on Legal Storytelling was
an interesting read,
It was not obvious what the findings were concerning the influence of
websites and the professional. The chapter fails to discuss any impact
on how legal professionals represent themselves and their ability to
attract clients. It would have helped the chapter if the findings
could have been explained unambiguously.

Stance features in legal blogging is a thought-provoking subject as it
is possible to derive attitudes towards continuous areas of law;
however, it was difficult to agree with the conclusions of this
chapter because there is a lack of substantive evidence caused by the
small corpus.

The language of some of the chapters is a little opaque, for example,
the Greinder and Stein chapter, where the casual reader will have
difficulty understanding what addition to the body of knowledge this
chapter provides.

Some of the chapters could have been improved by investigating the
impact of the features discovered by the authors;  for example, the
Niktina chapter could have discussed whether the mode of participation
affects the outcome of the case, or at least the performance of the
legal actors. It is feasible that the mode of address and the implied
cultural assumptions may impact the perceptions of the court about the
veracity of the witnesses' testimony.

The same issue impacted the Puruzzo and Scarpa chapter; it was not
obvious whether the project made Italian law more accessible, as there
was no evidence of community engagement. There is no evidence of the
advantage of this project over interested parties using machine
translation services such as Google Translate. Finally, the chapter
does not sufficiently address the issue of whether simply selecting a
subset of Italian law is suitable for communicating best practices.

A similar criticism could be leveled at the  Buniatova chapter. It
would have helped the chapter if there could have been some evidence
of this show’s influence on the public opinion of law students.

This book suffers from a lack of focus and is a little disorganised
because each chapter is discrete and has a different author or
authors. This is a common problem for this type of book. In addition
to this flaw, the chapters felt incomplete. The authors have an
interesting premise, but they did not follow up their central claim
with additional evidence. The authors limited their analysis to a
description of projects or linguistic contents of their domain, rather
than extending their work to its impact on the legal community. The
book does seem a missed opportunity.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Brett Drury is a lecturer in Computer Science at Liverpool Hope
University, where he teaches Natural Language Processing courses as
well as other Artificial Intelligence courses at Undergraduate and
Postgraduate level. He gained his PhD at the University of Porto,
where he was supervised by Prof Luis Torgo. He was a FAPESP post-doc
at the University of São Paulo, where he worked on building graphs
from natural language. Brett was a Research Fellow at the University
of Galway, He also holds a qualifying law degree from the University
of Plymouth.



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