Informace o publikaci
What Happens When Legal Language Leaves the Page?
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2026 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | Lawyers are often advised to read their texts aloud. This contribution takes that advice one step further, asking what happens when legal language is not merely read but performed. Drawing on recommendations commonly found in legal writing handbooks (e.g. Garner 2009), we explore what becomes perceptible when legal writing leaves the page and enters the voice and the body. How is it experienced by listeners unfamiliar with legal discourse? What kinds of estrangement, discomfort, fascination, or authority does such a performance produce? Partly analytical and partly performative, the presentation explores the peculiar effects of legal language through the public reading of selected legal passages. Rather than treating legal discourse as a transparent medium of communication, it approaches it as a practice that acts upon bodies and audiences. The performance itself becomes part of the inquiry, inviting reflection on the sensory and affective dimensions of legal authority. The contribution is embedded in ongoing research into the epistemic authority of legal texts and builds on preliminary findings from corpus analyses of legal language and interviews with legal practitioners. These findings reveal recurrent linguistic patterns that contribute not only to the apparent formality and objectivity of legal discourse but also to its peculiar and sometimes uncanny character. By recollecting these peculiarities and accentuating them through performance, we seek to better understand how they operate and how they are experienced. The presentation also turns this inquiry towards the audience itself. How will the spoken performance of legal writing be received, particularly by an audience composed largely of lawyers and legal scholars? Will it sound entirely ordinary, or strangely out of place? Exploring these reactions may provide further insight into the epistemic authority of legal language and, more broadly, into the ways in which the authority of law is experienced and embodied. |
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