April 2008 Volume 4 Issue 1
Article 2.
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Article Title
A Discursive Approach to Legal Texts: Court Judgments as an Example.

Authors
Le Cheng, King Kui Sin &Jian Li
City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Bio Data
Le Cheng received his MPhil in law from Southwest University of Politics and Law and MPhil in linguistics from Zhejiang University, and is a Ph.D. candidate at City University of Hong Kong. He is also a researcher at Forensic Linguistics Center of China University of Politics and Law. His interest and publications are related to forensic linguistics, ESP, and discourse analysis.

Dr. King KuiSin received his BA and MA from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and his Ph.D. from the Southern Illinois University. He is an associate professor at City University of Hong Kong and his interests cover the language of law, legal translation, and discourse analysis.

Jian Li is a Ph.D. candidate at City University of Hong Kong and her interest is in discourse analysis and forensic phonetics.

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Abstract:
Whether in legal practice or jurisprudence, court judgments or case briefs are one of the most important legal genres for the legal profession. In the Common Law system, precedents constitute an essential basis in legal argument. In China, with the country’s accession to the WTO, the transparency principles necessitate the study of the court judgments.With the economic globalization and the increasing interaction of legal affairs between countries, the paper examines contrastively the linguistic characteristics, moves and rhetoric of Chinese and American court judgments, with the aim of specifying the rhetorical preferences that are characteristic of “standard” judgments. The more significant point is that analysis of legal cultures is employed to account for the discursive differences. This study also has an underlying pedagogical motivation in that the results would be of great value and interest to the Chinese students of English for Legal Purposes (ELP) and the lawyers practicing foreign legal affairs.

Key words: ELP; legal texts; court judgments; discourse analysis