Litigating the Letter in Early Nineteenth-Century Newspapers

Czech-Slovak reciprocity was an integral part of the personal life program of František Votruba (1880–1953), which began in his his early youth, when he decided to leave his native Bohemia and move to Slovakia for work. In 1902, he came to Ružomberok to participate in the the publication of the newspaper Slovenské listy, which the publisher Karol Salva published in 1897–1900 to promote Czech-Slovak reciprocity. In the middle of 1903, he accepted Milan Hodža’s offer to contribute to the the publication of the political newspaper Slovenský týždenník, newly founded by Hodža; he moved from Ružomberok to Budapest, where he lived until the beginning of 1911. He later joined of the “group of Pest residents”, which co-created a new form of Slovak politics and culture. Through Hodža, Votruba became acquainted with the Slovak agrarian movement. He identified with the opinion that support for the Slovak national program should be sought among the Slovak farmers; the Agrarian movement should support them by solving their economic and social problems. Votruba added to that principal program his own ideas: the farmers’ need for education and culture through popular and educational texts. From the end of the first decade of the 20th century until the war years, he published in Czech periodicals, informing the Czech public about Slovak political, economic, cultural and literary conditions; furthermore, he reminded Czech readers of the importance of Czech activities for the dynamism of Slovak life, suggesting tasks for Slovakia. His goal was to promote the efforts of the first and second generation of the Hlasist movement and their magazines Hlas, Slovenský obzor and Prúdy. His interpretation of the relationship between Slovaks and Czechs were creating a historical narrative and a myth.

The first part of the article examines the background of the concept of ‘canard’, applied in France to popular non-periodical publications which reported incidents (often fictional), and to fictional news published in political daily newspapers. According to the testimony of various writers, including Balzac, such fictional news (‘canards’) in the first half of the nineteenth century was often associated with Russia. The second part of the article treats one of these ‘canards’, as reflected in two newspaper publications, ‘Press’ (Presse) and ‘Century’ (Siècle) in June 1844. These publications claimed that Emperor Nicholas I, who visited London at the end of May, went from there to Paris. The article shows why the Royal voyage to Paris could not have taken place and the reasons for the appearance of this ‘canard’ on the pages of the Paris newspaper.

Reviewed by: Spreading the Word: A History of Information in the California Gold Rush Mary Kay Duggan Spreading the Word: A History of Information in the California Gold Rush. By Richard T. Stillson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. viii, 274 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-8032-4325-1. The discovery of gold in California in January 1848 created the largest internal migration in U.S. history. Derived from the author’s dissertation in history at Johns Hopkins University, Spreading the Word is a case study of the impact of information availability and assessment on eastern Americans as they moved from being [End Page 495] completely ignorant of California to becoming informed travelers to the state from 1848 to 1851. News of the discovery of gold reached New York newspapers in the fall of 1848, and the overland journey had to begin by March or April of 1849 if the mountains were to be crossed before snowfall. The emigrants’ formidable information search required an assessment of the availability of the gold and the best route to travel as well as informed advice on how to outfit, provision, and manage the journey and how to mine the mineral. Chapters on the print resources, newspapers, guidebooks, and maps identify major problems with the reliability and availability of printed material. Other chapters follow the route of the travelers as printed information sources were gradually replaced by firsthand information from mountain men, and handwritten waybills were consulted instead of maps. Stillson offers an explanation of how the credibility and authority of information changed with the move west. The initial chapter focuses on twelve newspapers and their coverage of California in the months preceding the departure of what Stillson calls the goldrushers. A table of those newspapers with circulation figures and a count of articles provided by each would have been useful. The most important information source by far seems to have been the penny newspaper edited by James Gordon Bennett, the New York Herald. Bennett had “the most extensive network of reporters and correspondents of any newspaper in the nation” (15) and a California correspondent who enabled him to be the first in New York to print the news of the gold strike. Stillson traces developments from Bennett’s skeptical reception of that news in September to the publication of a special edition, the California Herald, on December 24, 1848, that actually had a discussion of routes and a map. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune sent a paid reporter to California via Panama, arriving in August 1849, to send back eyewitness reports for four months, in time for the even larger group of emigrants of 1850. Discussion of New England, midwestern, and southern newspapers is limited. In the next and most successful chapter Stillson examines titles read by gold-rushers by analyzing published studies of their diaries. Stillson shows how much of the content of guides and maps relied on information on the West that preceded the gold rush itself (e.g., in the reports of Fremont and Bryant) and gradually grew to include practical advice for emigrants. Newspaper publishers sought to capitalize on the market for information by assigning authors to compile available information and maps for goldrushers. Stillson pointed out that one of the best guides was written by an easterner who had been to California, T. H. Jefferson. (The gatekeeper function of the publishing industry kept Jefferson out; since his book had to be privately published, it was not advertised or included in booksellers’ catalogs.) Stillson analyzes the records of five companies of emigrants, with notes on four more, to examine nonprint communication. Since the heads of these emigrant groups included newspaper editors and authors who planned to publish their writings, these are far from typical accounts. They reveal the anxieties of the travelers as they made expensive decisions about creating the companies, outfitting and provisioning them, and choosing routes. Once en route, these highly literate emigrants relied less on the published guidebooks and maps they had purchased and more on reports in midwestern newspapers, the advice of guides, and word of mouth. After they crossed the Missouri River there were no more newspapers, [End Page 496] guidebooks, maps, or...

In 1864, press in the Latin alphabet was banned in Lithuania. This ban lasted until 1904. Despite all the efforts of the tsarist administration, banned books printed in Lithuania Minor and the United States of America reached readers of Lithuania Major. During 40 years, a new generation of Lithuanian books’ authors developed. It was caused by the growth and expansion of national movement and the nation’s consciousness in the ninth decade of the 19th century. After 1883 when the monthly public political and literary newspaper “Austra” in the Lithuanian language began being published, the number of Lithuanian book authors increased by 4–6 new names every year, while until the appearance of this newspaper this number was only 1–2 and not annually.The basis of the new generation’s authors was formed under the new circumstances, i.e after the press ban, by people with secular professions and occupations, not only those who had graduated from universities, institutes or seminaries, but also those who had finished only several classes and were self-educated. Due to the different economic and social conditions, access to education, most authors were from Suvalkija and East Aukštaitija. For this reason, the written language dialect changed. During this period, among the Lithuanian authors also women appeared.

The attempts to reform society from above, which the USSR leadership implemented, changed the place, role, and status of MVD employees in society. These were unplanned and unexpected changes that led to negative consequences for the security situation in the country. The purpose of this article is to analyze the social, political, and behavioral practices of ordinary police officers in the Ukrainian SSR in 1985–1991 and to study the changes in their motives and life scenarios during the rapid decline of the communist Soviet system.The methodological basis of the analysis is the concept of agency, applied through the analysis of archival sources, newspaper publications, and ego documents, which allow us to see police officers as subjects of political and social processes. Scientific novelty. The activities of the employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR are examined as an important factor in the collapse of the communist system. Conclusions. Police officers were involved in numerous practices that did not lead to raising their authority in society. Despite the truly heroic deeds of a whole cohort of police officers of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, the reputation of the agency and ordinary police officers only tended to become more negative. On the other hand, the conditions for police officers' work got worse every year, and their workload got heavier. Trying to solve their financial and reputation problems, officers used different, sometimes totally opposite practices. Some of them continued to act according to the “old rules,” in which the police acted not as a law enforcement service, but as a purely repressive organization. Others demanded change and were ready to initiate it themselves: they created trade unions, left the Communist Party, and called for the depoliticization of the police. More and more police officers quit their jobs and looked for other, higher-paying work. Some of them, using their old corrupt connections, created or moved to work for cooperatives, some created or moved to work for private security firms, and a certain group strengthened organized criminal groups with their knowledge and experience.The collapse of the police as a repressive and law enforcement institution led to a steady increase in all types of crime and a feeling of complete insecurity among citizens.

Purpose: The paper is driven by the following question: how do interest group narratives contribute to the dialogue between the perspective of strategy as a practice and the stakeholder theory? The objective is to analyze the changes, permanent and tensions in the narratives of the stakeholders, seen the strategic practices, in the context of mining. Originality/value: Strategy as a social practice concerns the relationships between organizations, individuals and society in search of coexistence. This study establishes a dialogue between strategy as a social practice and the political perspective of the stakeholders, considering that they interact in networks, seeking the creation of value from mutuality. Design/methodology/approach: Field research was conducted in a qualitative and longitudinal approach. Data collection used to document research techniques in notes and videos of public hearings, newspaper research and interviews. Findings: The results show narrative interactions of six interest groups: entrepreneurial organizations, public authority, education, environment, residents of the area of implantation and the productive sector. The result suggests a relevant role of relational tensions as elements that restrict and enable changes and permanent and indicate the dynamic nature of intra and intergroup interactions of stakeholders. The proposed theoretical dialogue extends the field of strategic studies, in a postmodern dimension, by establishing a dialogue with the political side of stakeholder action as an alternative to the traditional functionalist perspective in the field.

This chapter examines the influence that provincial newspapers wielded in the areas they served and the degree to which politicians could determine newspaper politics. Like the rest of the provincial press, the York newspapers lifted material from London papers. However, the traffic of material between the London and York papers was not one-way, and pieces which had originated in Yorkshire often found their way into the capital's newspapers. Material from York provided the lead in a particular debate rather than following or responding to the capital's newspapers. Despite borrowing material from each other, the York and London press had differing priorities, reflecting differences in the political opinions of their readerships and reinforcing the provinces' independence from metropolitan influence. The chapter argues that what mattered in terms of a paper's politics was not the personal view, but the perceived opinion of the readers and the need to cater to local preoccupations and concerns.

Reviewed by: Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper: The "Morning Post" and the Road to "Dejection" by Heidi Thomson, and: Poets of the People's Journal: Newspaper Poetry in Victorian Scotland ed. by Kirstie Blair, and: The Life and Works of James Easson: The Dundee People's Poet ed. by Anthony Faulkes Simon Rennie (bio) Heidi Thomson, Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper: The "Morning Post" and the Road to "Dejection" (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) pp. xii + 274, £66.99 cloth. Kirstie Blair, editor, Poets of the People's Journal: Newspaper Poetry in Victorian Scotland (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2016) pp. xxix + 225, £14.95 cloth. Anthony Faulkes, editor, The Life and Works of James Easson: The Dundee People's Poet (Dundee: Thorisdal, 2016) pp. 181, £6 paperback. These three volumes represent in one sense a broad spectrum of scholarly genres, being respectively a biographical snapshot of a discrete period in a canonical writer's life, an anthology of pieces from the poetry pages of one newspaper, and the collected prose and verse of a celebrated working-class poet. And yet these books are all immersions in one particular subject: the publication of poetry in nineteenth-century newspapers. They all demonstrate the significance of newspaper publication to the poetic culture of the period in terms of its production, distribution, and reception. Reading these volumes, one is struck time and again by the centrality of periodical culture to the factors that drive discourse between poems, between poets, and between poets and the public. The fact of their generic disparity in terms of scholarly writing only serves to underline the breadth of the cultural phenomenon they illuminate. [End Page 662] Heidi Thomson's Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper: The "Morning Post" and the Road to "Dejection" finds its focus in the crucial period between 1799 and 1802, which led to publication of the poet's famous ode in the London-published newspaper for which he contributed poetry and journalism at this time. There is already a good deal of literary biographical material on this period and the effects of the complex social nexus of the Coleridges, the Wordsworths, and the Hutchinsons on Coleridge's thought and writing, not least by commentators on the period including Richard Holmes and John Worthen. But this book's particular approach attempts to balance the biography with the context of the writer's publication of prose, poetry, and epigrams in the Morning Post. As Thomson states, many Coleridge scholars have already benefitted from the "massive legacy of his compulsion to record, analyse, and advertise his own emotions" (10). However, by tracing the writer's complex responses to shifts in his relationships with Sara Hutchinson and Wordsworth through a focussed interpretation of his Morning Post publications, Thomson complicates previous distinctions between public and private expression. Famously, of course, Coleridge's own marriage was floundering during this period, and his passion for Sara Hutchinson was integral to the first drafts of the poem. Much previous criticism has emphasised the distinction between Coleridge's two voices at this time: the public, highly encoded explorations of his emotional life through his poetry and the private voice revealed in sometimes extraordinarily frank letter writing as well as in conversations and behaviour reported by his close contemporaries. By concentrating her considerable interpretive skill on contextual readings of the epigrams, translations, and mass of poems (major and minor) published in the Morning Post during this period of emotional turmoil, Thomson has indeed, as she claims in her conclusion, offered a "deeper insight into the contradictory genius of Coleridge" (239). Ultimately, this book reassesses the extent to which Coleridge divulged his feelings about his attraction to Hutchinson and his increasing alienation from Wordsworth in the public space of the Morning Post. Seven chapters (after the introduction) trace the major events in Coleridge's life through the period 1799 to 1802 and offer readings of his publications in the newspaper, while a final chapter examines the ode itself in relation to its various iterations. A helpful appendix features the poem as it was published in this context. One of the original elements of this approach is that Thomson's eye is neither drawn excessively towards the...

This article provides a frame and textual analysis of coverage appearing in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report of the 114-day 1962-63 strike of the International Typographical Union Local 6 against New York City newspapers. The strike was particularly important for asserting the union’s collective bargaining rights and establishing its stance on automated printing processes. Analysis of the newsweeklies’ treatment of the strike suggests how these outlets related the event in terms favourable to the newspaper publishers, while misrepresenting or disparaging the union’s position in and justification for the strike.

Comics, either in the form of newspaper strips (funnies) or comic books, combine text and images to carry a narrative or a joke. Although semblances of comics can be found in Egyptian Pharanoic art, thousand‐year‐old Indian, Japanese, and Chinese scrolls, eighteenth‐century Japanese kibyoshi (yellow books), and thirteenth‐century European book illustrations, the nineteenth century is normally credited as their birth date. Strips by Rodolphe Töpffer appeared in Switzerland in 1827, and by Wilhelm Busch a few decades later in Germany, but it was in the US that newspaper comics flourished, especially after New York newspaper publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer used them to lure readers in the 1890s. After The yellow kid , usually considered the first US strip, was created in 1895, several hundred new funnies were started during the next five years.

The expansion of television through a proliferation of channels on cable, the advent and popularity of talk radio, and the entry of major media companies and new upstarts on the Internet at the beginning of the twenty-first century heightened awareness of the necessary scramble for audience by these medra entities. Indeed, the almost simultaneous expansion of these media channels has produced a frenzy of marketing ploys and a backlash of criticism about the excesses of these new undertakings, and objections to their blandness while they sought the lowest common denominator. One might conclude that this convergence constituted a rather unique period in US media development, but in reality, it shared many similarities with the creation and expansion of the first mass medium, the Penny Press, 170 years earlier. When, in the 1830s, Benjamin Day and other newspaper publishers transformed the daily newspaper from a narrowly focused and sparsely distributed publication to a broad-based, massproduced medium, societal changes were in place to enable this new medium to flourish just as they were with the advent of new media in the last half of the twentieth century. Technological developments, common interests among the potential audience, and literacy in the case of newspapers and lersure trme in the case of television made these media changes possible. But, just as electronic media companies sell their media channels through hyperbolic communication, Day and his cohorts did so as well, especially in New York City and other East Coast cities. An analysis of the first two years of The Sun in New York shows that Day demonstrated a range of product creation and marketing concepts long before these concepts had names: critical mass, tipping points, product differentiation, barriers to entry, building communities, and, of course, interactivity. Day's medium generated controversy that resembled new media figures of the twentyfirst century: Matt Drudge and the complaints about inappropriate forms of journalism; Bill Gates and predatory pricing; Steve case and pervasive branding. As television, radio, and Internet companies would discover 150 years later, Day faced problems with convincing an audience that the new medium was worth the expense or time, with plagiarism of content and ideas, and with demonstrating the difference between his news product and that of the competition. In addition, Day was always on the bleeding edge of a new media technology that was at times as uncooperative as the broken Window of a desktop PC. This analysis uses the theoretical perspective of social construction of technology (SCOT) as developed by Wiebe Bijker and Trevor J. Pinch, and later refined by other historians of technology. SCOT suggests that in any technological development, a number of technological alternatives exist, and over time, relevant social groups agree on the purpose, meaning, and physical form of the evolving technology by selecting and rejecting various options through dialogue and negotiation. The relevant social group may be a subset of a broader group (New York newspaper readers versus all US readers), and the influence may be a function of which decisions were made first, a process called path dependence by historians of economics and technology. The dialogue between Day and his audience obviously cannot be directly reconstructed, but the interaction can be inferred from the communications of Day with his readers and his occasional responses to their comments via The Sun (Bijker; Bijker and Pinch; Bij ker, Hughes, and Pinch; Garud and Karnoe; Pinch; David, Clio and the Economics of Qwerty; David, Path Dependence). The Beginning of the First Mass Medium In 1833, New York was already the largest city in the United States with 220,000 residents. However, a business depression had hit; the city was still suffering from a cholera epidemic that had killed 3,500 in the previous year; and the job-printing shop of twenty-three-year-old Benjamin Day was near collapse. …

This volume improves scholarly accessibility to the Exposición to the Cortes de Cádiz made on November 20, 1812, by Pedro Bautista Pino, the deputy from New Mexico. The transcription is from the official publication by the Estado General de Cádiz in the same year. Editor Jesús Paniagua Pérez expands attribution of the authorship of the exposition by Pino to include Juan López Cancelada, a peninsular merchant in New Spain turned political newspaper publisher. He collaborated with Pino in order to express his own views to the Cortes. Paniagua includes four additional documents by Cancelada, two by Pino, and one by the Comisión Ultramarina, which contextualize the collaboration. Paniagua’s introduction (pp. 19 – 144) reconstructs the political biographies of the two protagonist-authors within the histories of New Mexico and the Cortes de Cádiz.The effect is to centralize Cancelada in his relationship with his collaborator, Pino. Cancelada claimed true authorship of Pino’s Exposición when he later revealed that he encoded his name in the capital letters within the section of “Regalos a los gentiles” in the Adición to Pino’s main text (pp. 124 – 25). The collaboration does not take away from the points and recommendations Pino made as an American delegate to the Cortes. Pino had only a rudimentary education. Cancelada refined his notes into text with the assistance of another, anonymous peninsular. Paniagua illustrates, with the dating and contents of the other writings, that Cancelada’s views for quieting American revolution seeped into parts of the Adición and more fully invaded another statement that Pino entered into the record on November 20.The Pino-Cancelada collaboration illustrates the penetration of the rationalizing, progress-driven ideas of the Enlightenment at both core and periphery of the Spanish Empire. The New Mexican and the peninsular were both enlightened royalists. Pino was the grandson and son of merchants in the northern provinces. The grandfather was an Italian immigrant. Cancelada was an immigrant merchant who worked a circuit in the Bajío and lifted himself up into the confidence of the viceroy. They were both nationalists, one loyal to a patria chica in New Mexico and the other to Spain, the civilizer of an empire. They were both caught up in the whirlwind of Napoleon’s invasion, Hidalgo’s revolution, and the outbreak of constitutionalism in the Spanish Cortes. However, the logic of their respective nationalisms led them to propose different solutions to the crisis of empire. Pino sought to strengthen the monarchy through greater political and economic autonomy for New Mexico within the empire. Cancelada was a vociferous proponent of mercantile recolonization. Strange bedfellows indeed!Pino’s exposition reflected the mainstream thinking of the other American deputies to the Cortes. He requested a “Santo Domingo” exception for New Mexico from the law requiring that any province with a population of fewer than 70,000 persons merge with a neighboring province. A sea of 33 hostile nations engulfed New Mexico. The distances between it and other provincial capitals precluded effective administration, although an Audiencia in Chihuahua would still benefit the province. New Mexicans needed a caravan of 500 armed men to travel safely to Chihuahua. Five presidios should be moved from Nueva Vizcaya to New Mexico, and vecino militiamen should be paid for their costs. A bishopric and a seminary were needed at Santa Fe. A three-step ladder for local executive government would train homegrown political leaders. Two new regional trade fairs would complement new ports at San Bernardo on the Gulf Coast and Guaymas on the Pacific as outlets for New Mexico’s products. Loyal New Mexicans had rebuffed North American trade expeditions, but loss of the province was inevitable without action by the Spanish government. The issues Pino raised continued to echo in the future Liberal agenda for an independent Mexico. Pino’s ethnography of the surrounding tribes praised the allied Comanches for their brave warriors and beautiful women while condemning the enemy Apaches as obnoxious and cruel.Pino’s counterpoint, Juan López Cancelada, had a colorful political career on both sides of the Atlantic. He represented the interests of the peninsular merchants in the Consulado of Mexico City. He favored constitutional rights for Spain but not for America. He peppered the Cortes directly with his views and used Pino to get them into the official record. His basic argument, repeated in part by Pino, accused creole hacendados of tyrannizing the casta masses of African descent. He proposed ending the revolution for independence in Mexico by granting land to the castas through the established towns in the viceroyalty. Creoles would be paid 5 percent per year of the value of the land appropriated from them. Pino portrayed New Mexico as a happy contrast to New Spain, since he claimed the province had never known African castas, monopoly landholders, or grinding poverty. It was this proposal, opposed by the other American deputies, that the Comisión Ultramarina addressed and rejected.

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of post–truth in the modern media space, particularly in Spain. For the first time, the neologism “post-truth” was recorded in the explanatory dictionaries of the Spanish language in 2017. It was nominated for the “word of the year”. Interest in studying this phenomenon is growing every year as post-truth has become an integral part of the modern media space around the world. The phenomenon is widely studied in modern science. The research material for the article is the daily social and political newspaper ABC, which is considered one of the leading publications related to quality press in Spain. The author examines the phenomenon of post-truth on the material of newspaper publications devoted to the problem of violence against women during the state of emergency in Spain (from March 14 to June 21) due to COVID-19. The analysis of the published material in the newspaper (more than 250 articles) showed that journalists are actively using linguistic techniques of manipulative influence on the reader — exaggeration of facts or their distortion/inaccuracy, use of affective vocabulary, vivid and memorable phraseological units, epithets, comparisons, reference to unreliable sources and appeal to civil liability. All these linguistic methods contribute to the formation of a distorted picture of the actual situation in Spanish society regarding gender-based violence. The author revealed that the statistics in the newspaper do not correspond to the official data. All this testifies to the phenomenon of post-truth in the modern media space in Spain. The findings confirm that modern journalism plays on people’s emotions and feelings to attract the reader.

Referring to the materials of the uyezd political newspapers Narodny Vestnik , Yeniseysky Vestnik , documents first found in the State Archives of the Russian Federation, and the State Archives of Krasnoyarsk Krai, this article considers a little-studied issue of social history, i.e. the ways in which the principles and mechanisms of implementation of social assistance to the underprivileged groups of the population were formed in the emergency conditions of the Civil War. The analysis is limited to the territory of the Yenisei Province. Referring to it, it is possible to form an idea of how the processes in question took place in the life of such large regions as the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East. The chronological framework of the article includes the period of the Provisional Siberian Government (June-November 1918) and the Russian government of the Supreme Governor Admiral Kolchak (November 18, 1918 — December 1919), which considered the Siberian outskirts a “rescue territory” for the future democratic non-Soviet state. In order to achieve a holistic perception of social assistance practices and provide a basis for further in-depth study in this field, it is essential to determine the main trends of the state policy and the experience of local authorities in the field of social assistance in terms of continuity, interaction of its actors, and the conformity of the results with social expectations. For the purposes of the study, the authors use general research methods and methods of general historical and concrete historical research, the synthesis of the formational, historical-anthropological and activity approaches, and the theory of modernisation. The authors conclude that successful cooperation during the period under review proved impossible for a number of reasons: the lack of financial resources of the anti-Bolshevik governments, the instability of the political and military situation in the region, the absence of specialists in the government who had experience in managing social policy. Neither the Provisional Siberian Government nor the Russian government of the Supreme Governor Admiral Kolchak managed to review the number of socially underprivileged categories of the population, the state did not provide financial support to private and public charitable organisations, the decisions taken were not executed because of an ill-conceived implementation mechanism. The compromise solutions offered by the anti-Bolshevist governments could not satisfy the participants of social relations, which led to the collapse of the government’s social cooperation programme.

The aim of the work is to present a comprehensive approach to the study of linguistic features of the UK written judicial discourse, describe its features in terms of professional communication and social practice. We give a consistent analysis of the major factors which scaffold judicial discourse as a whole – the formal structure of the legal discourse and the formal content (textual sources) of judicial discourse. We believe the legal sources (texts of previous decisions and texts of legislative acts) contribute to the multi-faceted nature of the judicial legal discourse in which we can observe various processes: legal interpretation, recontextualization of ordinary facts in the professional legal field, statutory treatment and nominalization of facts and deeds etc. These and other characteristics created the dynamic nature of judicial discourse which is commonly seen as a static relic. Proper analysis and understanding of the formal structure of the legal discourse and its formal content (textual sources) bears major importance when addressing the analysis of linguistic features of written judicial discourse. Based on the analysis, the main characteristics of the written judicial discourse of Anglo-Saxon system are identified and the framework for further study of its linguistic features is determined. From our point of view, the study of the phenomenon of professional discourse is interdisciplinary in nature, in particular, the study of written judicial discourse is based on the positions of sociologists, linguists, philosophers and legal scholars. We use description and synthesis methods, as well as comparative and contextual methods. The theo-retical significance of the study lies in the development of the comprehensive approach to the lin-guistic analysis of professional discourses as a means of actualizing a certain social practice.