Investigating the Generic Features of the Sudanese Judicial Precedents

Abstract

This study aims at investigating the Sudanese criminal and civil judicial precedents so as to gain a better understanding of the communicative purposes of each subgenre and the variation in demands across the two subgenres using genre analysis. It adopted the mixed approach, using Maxqda application, to investigate the generic features, the moves, the sub-moves; as well as how problems are solved and decisions arrived at. The investigation shows that the law practitioners should know the intrinsic nature of these judicial precedents by examining their generic features, concepts, functions and approaches. Also, the analysis of the typical generic moves and sub-moves clearly reveals that the judicial precedents across the two subgenres have some overlapping generic structures at all levels. Most of the judicial precedents in the corpus seem to have the typical generic move structures. The analysis of the specific generic move structures reveals slight generic differences of judicial precedents. Finally, there are still evidences of slight variation across the two subgenres at sub-move level.