The Language of Lawyers: A European Perspective - Foundations in Language and Law

Legal Profession

The Language of Lawyers: A European Perspective - Foundations in Language and Law

By Jacqueline Visconti
De Gruyter Brill November 2025

Specifications

ISBN-13
9783111340753
Publisher
De Gruyter Brill
Publication
November 2025
Format
Hardback
Jurisdiction
Germany ? Countri(es) for reference only

Details

Clarity of court proceedings is increasingly considered essential to both the efficiency and the quality of a modern judiciary. One particularly under-researched area is the language of pleadings, i.e., texts written by lawyers representing the parties in court. Building on the results of the AttiChiari project, the first part of the book contains chapters on recent legal reforms and the language of Italian lawyers, while the second part includes chapters on the language of lawyers in Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Romania and the United Kingdom.

With contributions from leading experts in the field, the volume combines legal and linguistic expertise in equal measure, as well as a substantial body of practical reflections by civil and criminal lawyers. Having clarity of court proceedings as a unifying thread, the volume focuses on access to justice as a prerequisite for democracy and for a truly inclusive society.:

Table of Contents

Introduction
Jacqueline Visconti

Part I: Lawyers’ pleadings in Italy
Concision and clarity in the structure of Italian pleadings: A comparative overview in a European perspective
Anna Barbano
The principle of clarity and conciseness of documents following the reform to the Code of Civil Procedure
Federico Ungaretti Dell’Immagine
Between civil trial rules and good writing advice
Ilaria Pagni
Le Mot Juste: Clear language as a “systemic” value, and the role of the lawyer
Serena Dentico and Giorgio Sobrino

The linguistic perspective
In the instant haze: Clarity and unclarity in lawyers’ pleadings
Riccardo Gualdo
Old and new rules for legal writing in Italy
Federigo Bambi
Language of the lawyer and language of the judge in court proceedings in Italy
Maria Vittoria Dell’Anna
Lexical variation in lawyers’ pleadings: Observations from the AttiChiari corpus
Laura Clemenzi
Writing clear pleadings: The contribution of punctuation
Giulia Lombardi
Tradition and innovation in the language of Italian pleadings: Anglicisms and Latinisms
Francesca Fusco

The IT perspective
New approaches to processing and modeling judicial corpora
Daniele Fusi

Insights from and on the bar
Composing pleadings (as in music)
Lelio della Pietra
Legal writing: Expectations, memories and a few things learned
Gaudenzia Brunello
The power of words, the choice of words: Inside and outside judicial proceedings
Angelica Scozia
Gender-based violence at trial: A new language for respecting human rights
Sabrina Lucantoni
Gonario Pinna: A lawyer in Sardinia
Guido Melis

Part II: Lawyers’ pleadings in Europe
The style of barristers’ submissions when defending a civil case in court: An outsider’s view on England and Wales
Silvia Ferreri
Sketches on English and Italian pleadings in civil procedure: Language, structure, style
Luca Passanante
Skeleton Arguments: Use and abuse
John Bowers and Hannah Hinton
Language variation in the written communication of German lawyers
Hannes Kniffka
Written pleadings in German civil trials
Eva Wiesmann
Defence proceedings in France: Between tradition and standardization?
Michel Cannarsa
Linguistic and discursive analysis of French legal writings for the defence
Margarete Flöter-Durr and Paulina Nowak-Korcz
From como mejor proceda to the first and second otrosí: The language of defence counsel in Spain
Miguel Ángel Campos-Pardillos
Portuguese defence proceedings and court applications: aiming for clarity and inclusiveness
Pierre Lejeune and Amália Mendes
The language and structure used in the defence statements of Flemish lawyers: An exploratory study
Karl Hendrickx, Henk Pander Maat and Raf Van Ransbeeck
The language of the defence: Communication in Finnish courts
Laura Ervo
The language of defence in criminal proceedings: The Polish perspective
Barbara Janusz-Pohl
The language of family court petitions and applications in Romania
Sorina Ciobanu

Index
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