This book explores the ways language is used by the professional legal community for the communication of its main business - the negotiation of justice - in today’s globalized world. The volume addresses three main aspects of language use in the negotiation of justice. Beginning with the legal contexts of litigation, arbitration and mediation, the book moves on to discuss the main issues identified in those contexts and finally it explores the applications of legal linguistics. These three aspects are studied across the themes of analyses of legal discourse and genres, issues of power and ideology in the use of legal language, cross-cultural legal communication, questions of recontextualization, accessibility and plain language, law and disciplinary identity, and pedagogy of legal language. With chapters set across a variety of jurisdictions, the contributions offer analytical insights into the interface between law and language. The book is a valuable resource for those in the legal community wishing to increase their understanding of the use of language for the negotiation of justice.

This book examines the costs and benefits of ending the fighting in a range of conflicts, and probes the reasons why negotiators provide, or fail to provide, resolutions that go beyond just 'stopping the shooting.' A wide range of case studies is marshaled to explore relevant peacemaking situations, from the end of the Thirty Years' War and the Napoleonic Wars, to more recent settlements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries--including large scale conflicts like the end of WWII and smaller scale, sometimes internal conflicts like those in Cyprus, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Mozambique. Cases on Bosnia and the Middle East add extra interest.

Negotiation is a ubiquitous part of social life. Some even say that social order itself is a negotiated phenomenon. Yet the study of negotiation as an actual discourse activity, occurring between people who have substantial interests and tasks in the real social world, is in its infancy. This is the more surprising because plea bargaining, as a specific form of negotiation, has recently been the center of an enormous amount of research attention. Much of the concern has been directed to basic ques tions of justice, such as how fair the process is, whether it is unduly coercive, and whether it accurately separates the guilty from the innocent. A study such as mine does not try to answer these sorts of questions. I believe that we are not in a position to answer them until we approach plea bargaining on its own complex terms. Previous studies that have attempted to provide a general picture of the process as a way to assess its degree of justness have neglected the specific skills by which prac titioners bargain and negotiate, the particular procedures through which various surface features such as character assessment are accomplished, and concrete ways in which justice is administered and, simultaneously, caseloads are managed.

Language and the Right to Fair Hearing in International Criminal Trials explores the influence of the dynamic factor of language on trial fairness in international criminal proceedings. By means of empirical research and jurisprudential analysis, this book explores the implications that conducting a trial in more than one language can have for the right to fair trial. It reveals that the language debate is as old as international criminal justice, but due to misrepresentation of the status of language fair trial rights in international law, the debate has not yielded concrete reforms. Language is the core foundation for justice. It is the means through which the rights of the accused are secured and exercised. Linguistic complexities such as misunderstandings, translation errors and cultural distance among participants in international criminal trials affect courtroom communication, the presentation and the perception of the evidence, hence jeopardizing the foundations of a fair trial. The author concludes that language fair trial rights are priority rights situated in the minimum guarantees of fair criminal trial; the obligation of the court to ensure fair trial or accord the accused person a fair hearing also includes the duty to ensure they can understand and be understood.

In Civility, Nonviolent Resistance, and the New Struggle for Social Justice, contributors expose the roots of injustice and violence, and propose civil, nonviolent ways of challenging them.

In this work, Turning explores the role of the urban public in shaping local jurisdiction as the region of Languedoc became a part of the Capetian kingdom in the 13th and 14th centuries.