Legal-lay communication: Textual travels in the law

Heffer, Chris ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0922-5807, Rock, Frances ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1684-9354 and Conley, John, eds. 2013. Legal-lay communication: Textual travels in the law. Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199746842.001.0001

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Abstract

Legal-Lay Communication combines a range of perspectives on a key theme in language and law with a specific theoretical focus on how texts ‘travel’ through the legal process. The chapters in the book explore aspects of legal-lay communication, or those nodes of interaction where the legal world meets the everyday lifeworld. This may involve instances when people acting for the legal system, from police call-handlers to judges, interact with people encountering the legal process in a lay role, for example, as witnesses and suspects, though this transparent reading of "legal" and "lay" is challenged in the book. The theoretical nexus for the exploration in the individual chapters is the notion of ‘textual travel’, a portmanteau term for a series of concepts that are well established within linguistics, anthropology and sociology and which have been discussed using such terms as entextualization, decontextualization, recontextualization, intertextuality, interdiscursivity and textual trajectories. Collectively, notions of textual travel shed new light on the ways in which texts can be transformed in social and legal life. After an introduction to legal-lay communication and textual travel, Part II explores processes of mediation (through technologies, interactions, and the media) as found in the investigatory stages of the legal process. Part III focuses on the importance of intertextuality in the legal construction of cases in court. Part IV considers the transformative effects of recontextualization in processes of judicial decision-making. Finally, Part V explores how the apparent permanence of legal categorization is shaken by these processes of textual travel.

Item Type:	Book - edited
Book Type:	Edited Book
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General) P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISBN:	9780199746842
Last Modified:	01 Aug 2026 22:20
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/52680

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