Legal English Research Articles

Education Challenges and Developments in Foreign Language Teaching in Croatian Law Schools Education Challenges and Development for the Future

In the modern world of global economic and political associations, the knowledge of foreign languages and communication skills represent essential factors in all professions. In this respect, knowledge of English language as lingua franca of international communication is an indispensable prerequisite for communication within the legal profession worldwide. This paper is a case-study of teaching foreign languages in Croatian Law Schools, presented on the case of the Faculty of Law, University of Osijek. In the introductory part of the paper, a short description of the status and the position of foreign language courses in the Higher Education System of the Republic of Croatia is offered. In the main part the author presents new developments in the foreign language teaching in Croatian law faculties as answers to current challenges of Croatian membership in the EU. On the example of the Faculty of Law, University of Osijek, new projects on teaching foreign languages to practicing lawyers and law students are presented, with an emphasis on the Lifelong Learning Programme for Lawyer-Linguists. This programme, as well as specific foreign language courses in Legal English, Legal German and Legal French, have been developed within the lifelong education projects for lawyers, by which young lawyers are offered an opportunity to learn and/or to improve their knowledge of the three working languages of the EU. These developments in foreign language teaching within the Croatian Higher Education System are one of the responses to current challenges of the internationalization of the modern world. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2015.v5n1s1p87

From language to society: An analysis of interpreting quality and the linguistic rights of the accused in selected Zimbabwean courtrooms

Like most African countries, postcolonial Zimbabwe is multilingual with more than 15 indigenous languages. Since Zimbabwe was a British colony, colonial policies ensured the entrenchment of English as the language of sports, education, records and law. English is spoken mainly as a second or even third language by the majority of Zimbabweans. Even for those who speak English fluently, or with near fluency, the technical vocabulary of legal English, and the specialised use of ordinary terms, often results in miscommunication in the courts of law. This complex sociolinguistic situation requires the services of interpreters to bridge the communication gap between the custodians of the law like magistrates, prosecutors and judges and ordinary people who do not speak the language of the court, particularly in difficult, sensitive and complex cases such as rape trials which normally invoke cultural, psychological and emotional responses for all courtroom players. This article investigates the interplay between language and society by examining the quality of the interpreting in cases involving alleged rape in Zimbabwean courtrooms. We analyse interpreter renditions during open court sessions and examine transcriptions of trials obtained in courtrooms. Our findings suggest that there are chances of miscommunication in courtrooms due to hitches in the interpreting process which have adverse effects on the rights of the accused and/or witnesses to a free and fair trial. Although the findings are based on Zimbabwean data, we believe that many of the issues that are raised in this article could be applicable to other countries with similar sociolinguistic profiles.

Grammatical means of textual cohesion in appellate court decisions

The submitted paper deals with analysis of grammatical means of textual cohesion in English in a specific genre of legal register, i.e. in appellate court decisions. The theoretical framework of analysis is the theory of textual cohesion introduced by Halliday and Hasan in their work Cohesion in English (1976), which considers only intersentence cohesive ties to be textually cohesive and which distinguishes four categories of grammatical cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. In the analysed texts, all the instances of these four categories of grammatical cohesion are identified and statistically evaluated. The aim of the analysis is twofold. The first goal of research is to find out what kinds of cohesive devices appear with the highest frequency. Another focus of analysis is to find out whether the grammatical means of textual cohesion under analysis contribute to the stylistic qualities of the analysed texts and make them unambiguous and clear enough for interpretation. The findings of the analysis as well as their subsequent comparison with other registers indicate that the most frequent grammatical means of textual cohesion, namely demonstrative reference and additive conjunction, significantly contribute to precision, formality and logical organization of the analysed genre of legal English. DOI: 10.20420/rlfe.2015.0010

OBSCURITY IN THE MICROPOLITICS OF ENGLISH FOR LEGAL PURPOSES: TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK

Research in English for Legal Purposes (ELP) has expanded in the past 30 years, in parallel with the increasing attractiveness of transnational legal education. The present paper aims at observing how ELP research has dealt with the issue of globalisation of law studies, considering that legal taxonomies remain largely national. The analysis expands on the application of Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary (ASI) theory (Durand 1969) to a language policy context to describe the positioning of ELP researchers and law experts in relation to each other. Focusing on the notion of posture, an the analysis of images in a corpus of 68 ELP research papers suggests that the theme of obscurity lies at the heart of ELP research discourse. Power-related images fall into the four broad categories of animality, depression, the fall and the labyrinth. The contribution of ASI theory to the study of the micropolitics of ELP thus appears to be two-fold. ASI theory sheds light on the metadiscourse on power that runs through ELP research and that helps understand agents' positioning. ASI theory applied to ELP research eventually sheds light on the aporia (Glanert, 2005) Legal English researchers and law experts are faced with in an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) context. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7220/2335-2027.6.4

A Proposal to Exploit Legal Term Repertoires Extracted Automatically from a Legal English Corpus

The use of specialised corpora as support material in ESP/EAP is a widespread phenomenon yet, to the best of our knowledge, the amount of corpus-based materials in the area of legal English is considerably reduced. This study presents the proposal of several corpus-based activities to foster the acquisition of legal terminology. To that end, an 8.85 million-word legal English corpus (BLaRC) was compiled and processed to identify its most relevant terms using P.Drouin's (2003) TermoStat software. A corpus comprising three legal English textbooks (LegTeXT) was created to establish a comparison between the term inventories obtained from both corpora and thus determine the usefulness of the term list obtained from the former corpus to be used as support teaching material. Several tests were carried out finding 67% overlap between the two term inventories. Furthermore, using Heatley and Nation's (1996) Range software, it was found that 12.37% of the running words in the legal English textbooks were covered by the term inventory obtained from BLaRC. After reviewing the literature on the subject, a taxonomy is also suggested for the classification of legal terms followed by the proposal of several vocabulary activities focusing on varied linguistic levels, namely, morphological, syntactic, semantic and discursive.

THE REFORM OF LEGAL ENGLISH AND ITS IMPACT ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE VERB PHRASE IN THE LANGUAGE OF BRITISH LEGAL ACTS

Legal English is known as a complex language system characterized by the use of formal terminology, complex syntax and a complicated style of writing. However, over the last 40 years legal English has been undergoing reforms which were initiated by the proponents of the Plain English Campaign. The main goal of this movement has been to simplify legal language, in particular the language of legal acts, for the purpose of making it equally comprehensible to both legal experts and ordinary citizens. This paper gives a brief overview of the most significant reforms that have taken place in the sphere of verb phrase focusing on the „deletion“ of the modal shall and the reduction of passive sentences, which are nowadays considered widely recognized rules in the drafting of not only British but also legal acts of all the English-speaking jurisdictions. Keywords: Plain English Campaign, verb phrase, legal acts, reform, shall, passive voice

The Multifaceted Nature of Legal English

It is beyond suspicion that legal English stands as a sublanguage of paramount international importance. The extralinguistic basis of legal English has nowadays been extended embracing conflict of overall international-social, political (both foreign and home) interests. As seen from the title of the work, the primary goal of the present article is to investigate the nature of law English. The article covers a detailed analysis of some pivotal, challenging and highly significant linguistic issues that deal with the multifaceted nature of legal English based on the comprehensive historic review of legal English. Thus, the vital importance of the subject is accounted for by the substantial and decisive role legal English plays in our social life.

Thirty years of change

Legal English is inevitably different to the ordinary use of language but this does not excuse the use of language which is verbose, obscure, repetitive or incorrect. Happily there is a growing trend toward the use of legal language which is plain and intelligible. In this transcript of his recent talk, Lord Justice Lewison considers the evidence for that trend, and also considers the way in which the English Courts have recently approached the interpretation of contracts.

Evaluation of five single-word term recognition methods on a legal English corpus

Specialised texts are characterised by, amongst other features, the presence of terminology which conveys domain-specific concepts that are essential for the specialist who is interested in analysing such texts. Automatic Term Recognition methods (ATR) are employed to identify those terms automatically, which is especially helpful in view of the large size of corpora nowadays. However, they tend to concentrate on the identification of Multi-Word Terms (MWTs) neglecting Single-Word Terms (SWTs) to a certain extent. This might be related to the greater number of the former found in fields such as biomedicine. However, so far as legal English is concerned, testing has shown that SWTs represent 65.22 percent of the items in the specialised glossary employed for the evaluation of the ATR methods examined herein. This paper presents the evaluation of five SWT recognition methods, namely, those of Chung (2003) , Drouin (2003) , Kit and Liu (2008) , Keywords (2008), and TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency). These were tested on the United Kingdom Supreme Court Corpus (UKSCC), a legal corpus of 2.6 million words which was compiled for this purpose. The results indicate that Drouin's TermoStat software is the best performing method, achieving 73.45 percent precision on the top 2,000 candidate terms.

The Usage of Colligations of Prepositions among Malaysian Law Undergraduates: A Needs Analysis

Needs analyses carried out among Malaysian law undergraduates, particularly those investigating the students’ lack of competence in legal English, are rare. This paper aimed to investigate Malaysian law undergraduates’ perceptions and usage of colligations of prepositions, one of the most essential lexico-grammatical components in legalese. 40 third semester Malay law undergraduates from one public university participated in the study. Two types of data were collected for this purpose - an interview and essay writing test. Eight out of the 40 students participated in the interview, while all respondents took the essay test conducted a week later. The interview responses were analysed manually, and Dulay et al.’s (1982) Surface Strategy Taxonomy was employed in the analysis of the subjects’ production of prepositional patterns in the Problem Question essays (of legal contract genre). The results from the interviews and essays demonstrate that the subjects lack knowledge of prepositions and their patterns, resulting mainly from interlingual (L1 negative transfer, i.e. Malay) and intralingual (difficulty with the L2 itself, i.e. legalese) interference, as well as the drilling methods applied in both primary and secondary schools. More needs analyses should be carried out in a specialised field like law in future for the short-term and long-term benefits of the students. While both English and law lecturers may gain feedback on their students’ current lexico-grammatical competence, whereby some actions can be taken to improve performance, the results from the analysis may help in developing materials for ELAP (English for Legal Academic Purposes) courses, or in establishing an ELAP course, especially if the course has not yet been established in the institutions offering law programmes.

Why Does Legal English Sound Like Gibberish To Many Spanish Law Students?

Legal English is unfortunately still a rare bird in law faculties in public universities in Spain. However, a command of legal English — the generic term used in this article to refer to both a specific legal subject taught in English and an instrumental “English for Specific Purposes” (ESP) subject in the legal sphere — is one of the assets that the voracious labor market demands of even recent graduates. This article is a personal reflection on the multiple dysfunctional factors in Spain that, together, prevent this gap from closing as quickly and completely as would be desirable. My article also shows that other, more auspicious developments in the legal English teaching and learning field are starting to take root in Spain and that there are also reasons for believing that Spanish lawyers can be relied on to take the lead in the long overdue “degibberization” of legal English.

ŚRODKI WYRAŻANIA MODALNOŚCI W EUROPEJSKIEJ KARCIE JĘZYKÓW REGIONALNYCH LUB MNIEJSZOŚCIOWYCH. LINGWISTYCZNA ANALIZA PORÓWNACZA WERSJI W JĘZYKU ANGIELSKIM, WŁOSKIM I HISZPAŃSKIM

The present paper analyses the verbal expression of deontic, epistemic and performative values in the English, Italian and Spanish versions of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, a treaty of the Council of Europe which aims to protect and promote the historical regional or minority languages of Europe. The objective of this paper is to show that Legal English, Legal Italian and Legal Spanish express in a different way the deontic, epistemic or performative values of verbal constructions, in particular recurring, or not, to modal verbs or to specific tenses. The results of the paper reveal that Legal English frequently uses modal verbs to express deontic or epistemic modalities of verbal forms, whereas it privileges indicative tenses to express performative modality; Legal Italian prefers indicative tenses to convey deontic and performative modalities, and subjunctive tenses to convey epistemic modality; Legal Spanish privileges indicative tenses to express deontic and performative modalities, and subjunctive tenses to express epistemic modality.

On the Language Features of English Contract Translation

Legal English emphasizes precise wording, fluent writing and abundant information. Its expression is obscure and the structure is complicated. The features of English law are widely criticized and also cause tremendous difficulties for understanding and application. English contract, a legal document which has instant effectiveness, clearly defines the responsibilities, rights and benefits of the parties, so its language is considerably different from general language. This paper seeks to analyze the lexical and syntactic features of English contract so as to better assist legal translation.

How plain is legal English in statutes?

This article analyzes whether Plain English Campaign has influenced the language of British statutes. The author enumerates some requirements plain English in legislation should satisfy and compares to what extent, if any, the drafters of legislative texts have managed to satisfy these requirements. Special attention is paid to the mostcriticized features of statutes such as archaic words and the modal shall. Some other aspects analyzed in the article are the use of Voice, Tenses, syntax and organization of British statutes. The author provides examples illustrating the points stated, outlines a perspective for further research and comments on some difficulties Plain English Campaign may face in the UK as far as the legislative texts are concerned.

HE ESP TEACHER AS RESEARCHER

Abstract The field of language teaching, both TESOL and ESP, is undergo- ing rapid changes. It is responding to new educational trends and paradigms and institutions face new challenges connected with changes in the curriculum, national tests and student needs. As a result, language teachers need to update their professional knowledge by taking on new roles, such as those of teacher- researcher. The purpose of this paper is to present new developments in the area of general language teaching research, with a particular focus on meth- ods of qualitative research that might be found useful while examining certain aspects of teaching in the field of ESP, such as case studies, action research, interviews or observations. The presentation of research methods is followed by a review of research practice focused on pedagogical issues published in re- cent years in ESP journals, such as English for Specific Purposes, The Asian ESP Journal or Journal of English for Academic Purposes. Of major interest are articles on Legal English. The article concludes with suggestions for further study.

TEACHING AND LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES FOR LEGAL PURPOSES IN CROATIA

Abstract In accordance with the Bologna Declaration, modern languages and communication skills have a growing importance in all professions. With the prospect of Croatian membership of the EU and taking into consideration the conditions of the growing internationalization of law in general, knowledge of foreign languages represents an indispensable prerequisite for international com- munication within the legal profession. Thus, teaching foreign languages in the field of law, especially English and German, is necessary not only for the pro- fessional education of Croatian law students, but also for their mobility within the network of European universities. This paper presents a case-study of the current situation in teaching Legal English and Legal German in Croatian Law Schools. First, the status of foreign languages for specific purposes (FLSP) in the Higher Education System of the Republic of Croatia in general is analyzed. The main part of the paper is dedicated to teaching Legal English and / or Legal German as compulsory courses within the curricula of Croatian law faculties (status, syllabus design, teaching methods). Then some projects on teaching foreign languages to practicing lawyers will be presented. With the prospect of Croatian membership of the EU, specific education programmes for lawyer- linguists have been introduced by the Law Faculties of Zagreb and Osijek. These programmes, developed within the lifelong education project for lawyers, offer an opportunity for Croatian law students and young lawyers not only to im- prove their knowledge of Legal English and Legal German, but also to learn other languages of the EU, like French or Italian. These new programmes are the response of Croatian foreign language teachers to the current requirements of the European labour market and the challenges of the internationalization of the modern world.

THE ROLE OF TEACHER KNOWLEDGE IN ESP COURSE DESIGN

Abstract English for specific purposes (ESP) has been conceptualized by its leading scholars, like Hutchinson and Waters (1987) or Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998), as a multi-stage process, where the ESP practitioner fulfils a variety of roles, including that of learner needs researcher, course designer, language instructor, learning assessor, and course evaluator. The performance of these roles requires considerable knowledge of a linguistic, socio-cultural and pedagogical nature, necessary to inform the teacher’s cognitive processes, par- ticularly those involved in course decision making. The necessary professional knowledge of the ESP teacher, which is gained through professional school- ing, teacher training, and teaching experience, comprises both relevant theo- retical concepts (knowing what) and performance skills (knowing how). It di- rectly impacts on all stages of the ESP process, namely the planning, design, teaching, assessment and evaluation of a course, largely determining its quality. The present paper focuses on ESP teacher cognition, especially those cognitions (i.e. knowledge and beliefs) that are involved in course design, informing the teacher’s choices of course parameters and instructional practices. Elaborating on the concepts developed by language cognition scholars, like Shulman (1987), Andrews (e.g. 2007), and Borg (e.g. 2006), the author tries to outline the in- ternal structure of ESP teacher cognition and describe the function of each subordinate knowledge base. The paper also presents the preliminary results of a small-scale exploratory study into the professional cognition of 13 teachers of Legal and Business English employed at the University of Warsaw.

A Course Design Guideline for Legal English Teaching in Chinese Tertiary Education: From the Perspective of Content-based Instruction

Although the course of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is increasingly popular in China, ESP courses today are no more than teaching specific words and phrases and translating texts following the traditional grammar-translation method. With China’s active participation in the international affairs, more importance is expected to be attached to the design of ESP courses that can be facilitative in preparing learners for their future career in an international context. Under such circumstance, this paper is intended to offer a layout principle of ESP course design tailored for Chinese university law students based on Content-based instruction (CBI) approach. It first reviews conceptual notions regarding CBI and then move to look into related issues concerning the current ESP course design. Admittedly, these issues can be viewed from differential angles in diverse ESP contexts, the proposed framework for ESP course design is expected to be beneficial to teachers who are engaged in ESP course development.

Is One Semester of Legal English Enough?

The paper aims to research whether second year law students who are non-native speakers of English and study legal English (C1/C2) at Vytautas Magnus University (VMU) acquire enough knowledge of legal English during their one-semester-long studies in order to pursue their future studies in English, since later they have to take certain law subjects in which legal English is used as a language of instruction. This may seem to be very complicated if not enough knowledge of legal English is acquired before taking such subjects in English. Therefore, in the small scale research that used an online questionnaire consisting of open and closed questions, 19 research participants were asked about their class attendance, usefulness of legal English, the most challenging areas in studying legal English, the amount of time the students had spent on their studies of legal English outside the class, and whether they felt they had enough knowledge of legal English to be able to listen to other law subjects of their study programme in English after taking the course of Legal English. They were also asked to provide suggestions of what should be changed in teaching and learning of legal English in order to satisfy their present and future needs. The research showed that even though they had attended the classes and found the course useful, they (59.7 %) evaluated their knowledge of legal English as insufficient for following other law subjects with legal English as a language of instruction and 84.2 % of them would like it to be taught for a longer period of time. However, the study also showed that the students did not use their self-study time effectively, and it seems as a possible reason why they had not acquired enough knowledge in the course of Legal English in the spring semester of 2012 at VMU.

Writing Lessons from Abroad: a Comparative Perspective on the Teaching of Legal Writing

With a few exceptions, American legal writing pedagogy has not been adopted in any meaningful way in foreign countries. At most, it has garnered some attention in Legal English courses, but has otherwise received scant reception in foreign universities and little academic interest by continental and other civil law academics. This article explores the stark differences found in legal education between various countries as it relates to the teaching of legal writing.The reason transplantation, or borrowing, of American legal writing pedagogy has not occurred is due to the deep structural differences between the American legal education system and the education system found in most other countries, especially civil law countries. For example, many law schools in Western Europe require up to three years of apprentice experience before admitting a person into the practice of law. This apprentice requirement is in stark contrast to the general absence of any apprentice or internship requirements in the United States prior to being admitted to the practice of law as an attorney. This absence of an apprentice period in the United States’ legal education system gives a greater urgency to the teaching of legal skills – particularly legal writing – in American law schools. In addition, the market-based system of legal education found in the United States has shifted the cost of teaching legal writing from law firms and other legal employers to law schools, in contrast to most continental legal systems where employers (or government subsidies) provide such training. The fact that legal education in most civil law countries combines undergraduate and professional education and urges students to specialize in their legal education for particular careers (be it in the judiciary, academia, prosecutors’ offices, or general practice) also makes the American-style legal writing program less compelling to these countries. Generally speaking, continental legal education begins earlier for most students (usually age nineteen or earlier), runs longer (usually five years), and provides foundational courses such as history and philosophy in the initial years of study. In contrast, American law students come to law school with a variety of backgrounds and training, and the American legal writing classes found in its law schools provide a remedial and leveling function for American law students whose undergraduate training did not provide for skills needed for law studies. This article does not argue that it is impossible, impractical, or unimportant to try to transplant legal educational methods from one system to the other. Quite the contrary, American and civilian law schools share the same basic pedagogical goal which is to train skilled lawyers and legal professionals. As a consequence, the teaching of skills such as legal writing should be a high priority in both education systems. The structural differences, however, cause each system to have varying strengths and weaknesses in the teaching of skills, particularly in the field of legal writing. An examination of these differences provides a useful point for learning and profiting from the other’s experiences.