Abstract
Having been invited by editor-in-chief, Professor Anne Wagner, to edit the present special issue, we decided to fulfil a longstanding wish to provide a panorama about the Hungarian Language and Law. Along with other ‘law and …’ movements, Law and Language has attracted a great deal of attention from subsequent generations of Hungarian academic lawyers, because the political transition served as a wonderful subject and context for scholarly papers and text books, for examining the putative or real influence of this or that popular social scientist or for undertaking literature overviews. Unfortunately, there have been relatively few academic papers that have sought to draw general conclusions from empirically well-founded case studies. In order to fill that important gap, this special issue has taken the opportunity to select only those interdisciplinary papers whose goals include an analysis of Hungarian legal discourse written from a critical angle and using critical empirical methodology. At the very outset of the editing process—back in 2018—for the purposes of this special issue we defined as ‘empirical’ any sufficiently coherent fact-based research that reflects the language of legal discourse. And ‘critical’ means an engagement with the values of the Rule of Law. This double methodological and axiological feature is manifest throughout the selected papers classified as ‘law and language’.
Highlights
Having been invited by editor-in-chief, Professor Anne Wagner, to edit the present special issue, we decided to fulfil a longstanding wish to provide a panorama of the Hungarian Language and Law
In 1989, after the fall of communism, the democratic transition to the Rule of Law in Hungary was given a warm welcome by Western political communities. Enough, it took fifteen long years before the country in 2004, along with other European countries, became a member of the European Union, having shown that it could meet the Copenhagen criteria, which require the stability of democratic institutions and respect for the Rule of Law. Another fifteen or so years on—how time flies!—in 2020 the poster child for illiberal democracy is Hungary, and Western political communities seriously question whether it still fits within the European community of the Rule of Law or Rechtsstaat
In order to fill that important gap, this special issue has taken the opportunity to select only those interdisciplinary papers whose goals include an analysis of Hungarian legal discourse written from a critical angle and using critical empirical methodology
Summary
Having been invited by editor-in-chief, Professor Anne Wagner, to edit the present special issue, we decided to fulfil a longstanding wish to provide a panorama of the Hungarian Language and Law. In 1989, after the fall of communism, the democratic transition to the Rule of Law in Hungary was given a warm welcome by Western political communities. Along with other ‘law and ...’ movements, Law and Language has attracted a great deal of attention from subsequent generations of Hungarian academic lawyers, because the political transition served as a wonderful subject and context for scholarly papers and text books, for examining the putative or real influence of this or that popular social scientist or for undertaking literature overviews. In order to fill that important gap, this special issue has taken the opportunity to select only those interdisciplinary papers whose goals include an analysis of Hungarian legal discourse written from a critical angle and using critical empirical methodology. Applying mutatis mutandis Bobbio’s distinction between lawyers’ legal philosophy and philosophers’ legal philosophy, we may dub our special issue lawyers’ ‘law and language’ rather than linguists’ ‘law and language’ [3]
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