The Dialogical Language of Law

Abstract

We live in a dialogical world. The normative environment around us is many-voiced. Legal activities like drafting, negotiating, interpreting, judging, invoking, and even protesting the law take place in dialogical encounters, all of which presuppose entrenched forms of social dialogue. And yet the dominant modes of thinking about the law remain monological. How can we bring our legal conceptions in alignment with the dialogical world in which we live? The present article follows in the footsteps of a dialogical, Bakhtinian theory of language that challenges the roots of contemporary positivist conceptions of law and language underpinning large swathes of legal academia and the legal profession—including recent approaches to legal interpretation called corpus linguistics. Against this backdrop, the article aims to develop a richer and more textured dialogical jurisprudence to encompass the various aspects, activities, and genres where legal language is employed.