This is the guest editors’ introductory paper to the special issue “Situating jurilinguistics across cultures using translation and discourse approaches.” The introduction showcases the interdisciplinary vocation of jurilinguistics from its conception almost forty years ago. It is argued that jurilinguistics has achieved its current maturity by diversifying the disciplinary lenses of the originally contributing disciplines of legal translation and legal studies while keeping faithful to its original principles—facing practical problems with a rigorous outlook, venturing into any new domains that may (...) prove enlightening, and combining professional and academic perspectives. The authors highlight how the series of conferences “Jurilinguistics: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Language and Law” have been instrumental in enhancing the scope of jurilinguistics. Finally, the articles gathered in this special issue are presented and their contributions in advancing the knowledge available for practitioners and scholars meeting at the interface between law and language are underscored. (shrink)

It appears that we know surprisingly little about how judges frame linguistically the rationale behind their decisions and how such texts are structured. Using the concept of rhetorical moves, this paper adopts a genre-based approach to examine the rhetorical structure of legal justifications provided in the decisions of the Polish Constitutional Court. The goal of the study is to verify the claim that the way justifications are drafted is becoming more and more uniform and conventional. The results show that there (...) is a common core of rhetorical structure realized by means of recurrent functional segments of text. This paper proposes a prototypical move structure of a Constitutional Tribunal justification and it argues that that the way justifications are drafted are subject to very concrete, even if not explicitly stated constraints. (shrink)