Legal humor is a topic of perennial appeal, and has long been a prolific source of books, articles, and scholarly commentaries which are avidly consumed by popular and professional audiences alike. However, although a number of scholars have analyzed the use of humor in judicial opinions, there is no comparable body of scholarly examinations of lawyers’ use of humor in their role as legal advocates. This omission is significant, because in the American legal system, humor and wordplay serve as highly-valued evidence of forensic skill which is deemed appropriate for display both within and outside of the courtroom. Accordingly, this paper attempts to fill the gap in the existing literature by examining attorneys’ use of humor as persuasive advocacy in two widely divergent settings, informal court-mandated mediation and oral argument before the United States Supreme Court. In

Lawyers' use of humor as persuasion

Judges’ use of humor as a social corrective

Previous studies have revealed the importance of studying spoken professional–client/outsider interaction, especially the Q&A session, in various professional settings. However, most of the studies...

Ethnographic discourse analysis: Conversion to Islam ceremony

Abstract As Hong Kong is the only common law jurisdiction operating in Chinese, alongside English, writing a common law judgment in Chinese is like exploring an uncharted domain in legal discourse. Apart from those judgments originally written in Chinese, Chinese judgments have also been prepared by way of translation from English. Besides, there are also English translations of Chinese judgments of jurisprudential value. Judgments in Hong Kong therefore present an interesting case for study both from a legal point of view and from the perspective of discourse analysis. As Chinese judgments in Hong Kong to a large extent mirror images of their English counterparts, they provide us with insights into how judicial thinking embodied in one language is carried over to another. As the translation of court judgments can serve as a clue to the understanding of how judicial thinking is transferred and reflected in another language, this study looks into some of the fundamental problems of legal translation in general and translation of court judgments in particular, showing how the sociosemiotic approach can shed light on those problems.

Adalberto Jordan

Papers

Imagery, Humor, and the Judicial Opinion