In this article, we take a novel approach to analysing English sentencing remarks in cases of women who kill. We apply computational, quantitative, and qualitative methods from corpus linguistics to analyse recurrent patterns in a collection of English Crown Court sentencing remarks from 2012 to 2015, where a female defendant was convicted of a homicide offence. We detail the ways in which women who kill are referred to by judges in the sentencing remarks, providing frequency information on pronominal, nominative, and (...) categorising naming strategies. In discussion of the various patterns of preference both across and within these categories, we remark upon the identities constructed through the references provided. In so doing, we: quantify the extent to which members of the judiciary invoke patriarchal values and gender stereotypes within their sentencing remarks to construct female defendants, and identify particular identities and narratives that emerge within sentencing remarks for women who kill. We find that judges refer to women who kill in a number of ways that systematically create dichotomous narratives of degraded victims or dehumanised monsters. We also identify marked absences in naming strategies, notably: physical identification normally associated with narrativization of women’s experiences; and the first person pronoun, reflecting omissions of women’s own voices and narratives of their lived experiences in the courtroom. (shrink)

This paper discusses the creation and use of the new Macquarie Laws of War Corpus. The corpus consists of the 110 documents of international war law stored in the International Committee of the Red Cross treaties database, starting with the 1856 Declaration Respecting Maritime Law and ending with the most recent amendment to the Rome Statute. The new MQLWC is hosted at the Sydney Corpus Lab, via its CQWeb interface, which allows for searching of frequencies, concordance lines, and collocations. The (...) corpus can also be downloaded for offline processing in other popular concordance programs, such as #Lancsbox and AntConc. This paper introduces the corpus, describes the process of assembling the data, and explains its limitations. The paper then demonstrates some of the ways the data can be explored using the concept of 'military necessity'. The MQLWC contributes to the growing use of corpus linguistics in legal studies, and will be of particular relevance to scholars in the field of international war law. (shrink)

There are many different ways in which modern Corpus Linguistics can be used to enrich and broaden our understanding of legal discourse. Based on the central principle of co-occurrence and co-selection in language construction, this paper reviews current applications of Corpus Linguistics in the area of legal discourse focusing on issues ranging from phraseology, variation in legal discourse, legal translation, register and genre perspectives on legal discourse, legal discourse in forensic contexts to evaluative language in judicial settings. It revisits the (...) notion of ‘corpus’ and it highlights the relevance of various types of legal corpora and computer tools in legal linguistic research. (shrink)