Our systems are now restored following recent technical disruption, and we’re working hard to catch up on publishing. We apologise for the inconvenience caused. Find out more

Recommended product

Popular links

Popular links


Legal-Lay Discourse and Procedural Justice in Family and County Courts

Legal-Lay Discourse and Procedural Justice in Family and County Courts

Legal-Lay Discourse and Procedural Justice in Family and County Courts

Tatiana Grieshofer, Birmingham City University
April 2024
Available
Hardback
9781009486927

    Focusing on adversarial legal settings, this Element explores discursive practices in court proceedings which often involve unrepresented parties – private family proceedings and small claims cases. Such proceedings present the main caseload of county and family courts but pose immense challenges when it comes to legal–lay communication. Drawing on court observations, alongside textual and interview data, the Element pursues three aims: (1) developing the methodological and theoretical framework for exploring discursive practices in legal settings; (2) establishing the link between legal–lay discourse and procedural justice; (3) presenting and contextualising linguistic phenomena as an inherent part of court research and practice. The Element illustrates how linguistic input can contribute to procedural changes and court reforms across different adversarial and non-adversarial legal settings. The exploration of discursive practices embedded in court processes and procedures consolidates and advances the existing court research conducted within the fields of socio-legal studies and forensic and legal linguistics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

    Product details

    April 2024
    Hardback
    9781009486927
    86 pages
    229 × 152 × 6 mm
    0.262kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Series Preface
    • Author Preface: For Forensic Linguists
    • Author Preface: for Legal Scholars
    • 1 Introduction
    • 2. Legal-lay discourse
    • 3. Discourse of civil and family proceedings
    • 4. Discursive practices, procedural justice and legal participation
    • 5. Language data and empirical methods
    • 6. Discursive practices in child arrangements proceedings
    • 7. Discursive practices in financial remedy proceedings
    • 8. Discursive practices in county courts
    • 9. Concluding thoughts and future directions
    • Appendix
    • Bibliography.
      Author
    • Tatiana Grieshofer , Birmingham City University