Book Review: Legal Linguistics
| DOI | 10.1177/1023263X1101800306 |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| Author | Jaakko Husa |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
336 18 MJ 3 (2011)
BOOK REVIEWS
Marcus Ga ldia, Legal Linguisti cs, Peter Lang, Fran kfurt am Main etc., 200 9, 434 pp.,
hardback, €68, ISBN 978 –3–631–59463–6.
§1. OVERVIEW
Our understa nding of the discipline of law, or more broadly the sphere of law, has been
expanding signicant ly during the last thirty years or so. In continental Europe the
doctrina l study of law (German Rechtsdogmatik) has traditional ly been challenged a nd
accompanied by philosophy, history, comparative law and various forms of social sciences
– rst and foremost, sociology of law. From Northern A merica we have also received
various novel branches to the old body of lega l studies most common ly conceived as
‘Law and Other Disciplines’, of which Law and Economics i s surely the most famili ar.
ese cha llenges have their contexts. In practice, in Europe many of the late scholarly
developments have been triggered by European integration but also by global ization.
One of the recent newcomers has be en the emerg ing eld of legal ling uistics which is
far from well dened and being an es tablished eld. However, these days there are many
who strive to dene thi s eld and seek to nd a proper place for it in the legal academia.
Marcus Galdia’s book Legal Linguistics, published in September 2009 by the Peter
Lang Verlag, is a serious and academically ambitious attempt to dene what the problems
of this interdisciplinar y eld are and, even more importantly, what this eld is all about.1
e outcome of th is attempt is a densely wr itten book with more than four hundred
pages, covering several languages and with a bibliography of some twenty pages. But it
is not only t he size that matters; t he scope of Galdia’s book is somewhat staggering and
it reects not only the questions of Legal Lingu istics but also the author’s wide linguistic
scope and diverse competences: legal theory, comparat ive law, translation studies, and
philosophy of language. ese are all covered extensively. e picture received by the
reader is well thought-out, a nd im mensely r ich in deta il a nd dept h concerni ng t he
subject. Yet, sometime s the ood of det ail comes very c lose to mentally suo cating the
1 So, ‘we wil l take a clos er look at the th eoretical foundat ions and the mate rial achievements of
Legal Lingui stics as t wo ma in is sues w hich de termine its current and future standing among the
interdiscipli nary branches of knowledge. By doing so, we w ill clarify the quest ion of the relation
between law and language’, M. Galdia, Legal Ling uistics (Peter Lang, Frankfur t am Main etc. 2009),
p. 19.
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