While it would be untrue to claim that research on the discourse of judges – and in particular judicial argumentation – is terra incognita, the fact remains that, until recently, it had attracted mostly legal scholars and philosophers. Indeed, there is a plethora of works dealing with judicial deductive processes and legitimisation of judicial decision-making as seen by legal positivism or natural-law doctrines. On the other hand, studies dealing with the linguistic construction of judicial argumentation, intended as channels through which courts resolve disputes and justify their decisions, also offer interesting insights into the “judicial” nature of the discourse of judges, and as such they may be of interest to linguists and legal scholars alike. Analysing the language of judgments from a discourse-pragmatic perspective, language-oriented accounts of judicial reasoning aim, on the one hand, to reveal what linguistic devices courts employ in order to establish and reinforce their authority and, on the other, to determine what contextual factors affect the choice of particular linguistic constituents.

Highlighting the interface between linguistics and the law, this book aims to provide a discourse-pragmatic perspective on judicial argumentation and, more specifically, to attempt an explanation of how and why judges rely on a certain discourse relation in the argumentative portion of judgments.