The chapters constituting this volume focus on legal language seen from cross-cultural perspectives, a topic which brings together two areas of research that have burgeoned in recent years, i.e. legal linguistics and intercultural studies, reflecting the rapidly changing, multifaceted world in which legal institutions and cultural/national identities interact. Within the broad thematic leitmotif of this volume, it has been possible to identify two major strands: legal discourse across languages on the one hand, and legal discourse across cultures on the other. Of course, labels of this kind are adopted partly as a matter of convenience, and it could be argued that any paper dealing with legal discourse across languages inevitably has to do with legal discourse across cultures. But a closer inspection of the papers comprising each of these two strands reveals that there is a coherent logic behind the choice of labels. All seven chapters in the first section are concerned with legal topics where more than one language is at stake, whereas all seven chapters in the second section are concerned with legal topics where cultural differences are brought to the fore.

Contents: - Maurizio Gotti/Christopher Williams: Introduction - Susan Sarcevic: Creating a Pan-European Legal Language - Colin Robertson: Legal-linguistic Revision of EU Legislative Texts - Martina Bajcic: Challenges of Translating EU Terminology - Jan Roald/Sunniva Whittaker: Verbalization in French and Norwegian Legislative Texts: A Contrastive Case Study - Lelija Socanac: Linguistic Transference in Croatian Law Articles - Silvia Cacchiani/Chiara Preite: Law Dictionaries across Languages: Different Structures, Different Relations between Communities of Practice? - Snjezana Husinec: The Use of Comparative Legal Analysis in Teaching the Language of the Law - Janet Ainsworth: Linguistic Ideology in the Workplace: the Legal Treatment in American Courts of Employers' 'English-only' Policies - William Bromwich: Discourse Practices and Divergences in Legal Cultures in Employment Tribunals - Giorgia Riboni: Constructing the Terrorist in the Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States and the European Court of Human Rights - Davide Mazzi: The Centrality of Counterfactual Conditionals in House of Lords and US Supreme Court Judgments - Ignacio Vázquez Orta: A Genre-based View of Judgments of Appellate Courts in the Common Law System: Intersubjective Positioning, Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity in the Reasoning of Judges - Thomas Christiansen: The Concepts of Property and of Land Rights in the Legal Discourse of Australia Relating to Indigenous Groups - Ismael Arinas Pellón: How Does a Patent Move? Genre Analysis Has Something to Say about It.

The Editors: Maurizio Gotti is Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Research Centre on Specialized Languages (CERLIS) at the University of Bergamo. His main research areas are the features and origins of specialized discourse. He is a member of the Editorial Board of national and international journals, and edits the Linguistic Insights series for Peter Lang. Christopher Williams is Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Language Centre at the University of Foggia. His main research areas are tense, aspect and modality in contemporary English and legal linguistics. He is co-editor of the journal ESP Across Cultures.