The Changing Landscapes of
Language and Law

Court proceedings are moving away from traditional models and strict in-person rules towards more flexible, digital formats. At the same time, new technologies are reshaping interaction patterns, affecting power relations, and redefining spatial boundaries in modern trials. This section aims to bring together scholars exploring these recent trends, including the emergence of virtual courtrooms and remote video hearings, digital evidence presentation, the role of user-generated evidence and the effect of AI tools on judicial decision-making. The section similarly seeks to relate these new practices to larger societal issues surrounding legal practice, such as (social) media representations of law and justice, access to justice and procedural fairness, as well as public trust in legal institutions and processes. We encourage those interested to submit papers that discuss diverse aspects of how digital technologies affect traditional court proceedings, reshape interaction patterns and redefine epistemic hierarchies. Various research perspectives are welcome, including pragmatics, (multimodal) discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and social semiotics.

Disinformation and hate speech across mass media, social platforms, and digital channels pose a growing challenge for democratic states. Disinformation aims to polarise public opinion, disrupt elections, undermine public health initiatives, and erode trust in institutions. UNESCO defines disinformation as "the deliberate spread of false or misleading information, often aimed at deceiving or manipulating individuals or groups." Its main objectives are to sway public opinion, influence political or military outcomes, or generate profits. Disinformation is intended to deceive by spreading fabricated content such as lies, rumours, and false stories; it involves manipulation through deepfakes, images taken out of context, or misleading headlines to distort real events; and it is also aimed at weaponisation, using social bots and algorithms in campaigns to amplify socio-political divisions and conflicts. Hate speech online remains an increasing social problem, as hate-advocating speakers use it to exclude target groups from mainstream society and keep them on the societal margins. Legally, hate speech extends beyond mere offensive language; it can be prohibited by law only when it involves "[…] any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence" (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), Article 20, paragraph 2). This standard indicates that, at the micro level, hate speech is a complex speech act because it simultaneously performs two actions: a) what the speaker commits to, and b) what the speaker calls on the hearer to perform (Beyssade & Marandin, 2006; Guillén-Nieto, 2023a, pp. 123–124; Guillén-Nieto, 2023b, pp. 189–194). Consequently, implicitness, indirectness, pragmatic inference (what can be inferred from what is said) (Elder, 2024), accountability and deniability are central to assessing intent in (online) hate speech cases for fact finders and legal adjudicators (cf. Rabat Plan of Action on the prohibition of advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence, 2012). This thematic area encourages submissions of individual papers or panels with more than three related papers on disinformation and/or hate speech, studied from legal, linguistic, or legal-linguistic perspectives. Papers discussing theoretical issues, as well as empirically based studies of specific problems, are welcome. References

The relationship between language and law is of central importance for linguistic studies in general, and for historical linguistics in particular, since legal texts offer a privileged perspective on phenomena of continuity and change. Their terminology, textual structures, and recurrent patterns of expression may remain stable over long periods, enabling legal meanings to be transmitted, recognized, and interpreted across different contexts. At the same time, legal texts respond to evolving social, institutional, and communicative conditions and may therefore provide valuable evidence of semantic, lexical, and textual innovation, as well as of the adaptation and transformation of inherited models. For this reason, different types of legal texts (laws, notarial documents, court records, statutes, formularies, glosses, translations, juridical treatises…) are valuable sources for examining how linguistic forms operate across different levels of use: from technical and institutional writing to documentary practice, from learned models to local traditions, and, in some cases, from spoken language to its written representation. They show how legal meaning is shaped through different textual forms and how linguistic choices are conditioned by the purposes, conventions, and contexts of legal writing. In this way, legal texts make it possible to study not only the history of legal discourse, but also the interaction of different linguistic levels in diachrony, especially where formulaic and highly conventionalized forms coexist with usages more closely connected to specific communicative situations. Precisely because they often stand at the intersection of different linguistic traditions, legal texts are also crucial for the study of language contact in historical perspective: they may preserve traces of multilingual practices, translation processes, lexical borrowing, semantic interference, and the adaptation of legal terminology across languages and cultures. The thematic area therefore invites contributions that investigate language and law in historical perspective, with particular regard to the linguistic analysis of legal texts, the role of legal writing in processes of language change, the formation and transmission of legal discourse traditions and documentary formulae, the relationship between legal terminology and social or institutional structures, and the methodological challenges posed by non-literary legal sources. By bringing together linguistic, sociolinguistic, philological, paleographical and legal-historical approaches, the area aims to explore how legal texts can illuminate processes of language variation and change, and the ways in which language, law, and society shape one another across time.

The language of legislation – understood as a 'positive' set of laws enacted by a recognized authority – displays distinctive features within the broader domain of technical legal language. Its structure is centered on its essential preceptive core, yet extends beyond it, integrating definitional, descriptive, and qualifying elements, both syntactically and terminologically. Its institutionally enhanced performativity – realized by each linguistic system according to its own structure – is crucial for the relationship between the norm-issuing authority and its addressees. In doing so, the language of legislation deals with inclusion and exclusion (of entities, persons, facts), reveals or conceals underlying frameworks (historical, ideological, cultural), reflects a mindset, and also constitutes a factor that contributes to shaping it. The fact that legal language in general, and the language of legislation in particular, often represents one of the earliest forms of transmitted language (whether oral or written) within a society also allows for a historical analysis, focusing on its origins or on its broader patterns of development, as well as on related aspects, as this module in particular aims to do. References

We are soliciting papers focused on improving social justice. Because law is a profession of words, (David Mellinkoff, The Language of the Law (1963)) we welcome a close examination of the language that lawyers and judges deploy to disguise or even legitimate injustice so these may be exposed and remediated. We welcome examination of the implicit propaganda — the tacit and often biased assumptions — that lurk beneath the surface of unperturbed probity but that lubricate the wheels and cogs of deceit if not unfairness and sometimes, oppression.

This thematic area includes papers that examine and explore not only legal proceedings themselves, but also the legislative process that generates the laws, and even the social and linguistic norms that seem to make some proceedings reasonable and normal when reflection suggests that they are anything but that. For example, one might examine how some judge manipulated or abused language to obscure or justify the unfair and inappropriate application of a law or legal regulation to a defendant. Another possibility would be to investigate how the choice of language used in a debate by legislators or others over proposed regulation of various behavior subtly pushed the argument in an unjust direction. There are many issues that could be considered questions “about” (1) morality and decency, (2) exploitation and oppression, (3) privacy and bodily autonomy, or (4) economic and entrepreneurial freedom. These include such things as the exchange of sex for money (or similar object of value), non-traditional reproductive assistance (selling eggs or sperm or gestating a baby for another), transgender medicine, and abortion. Another example would be language that creates new labels that can facilitate a cause of action, such as “sexual harassment” and “hate speech” or can circumvent constitutional protections, such as “terrorist,” “gang,” “hate speech” and “disinformation.”

We welcome papers taking any of these or other approaches that relate language and law with social justice.

This thematic area explores the evolving role of rhetoric and argumentation in legal and institutional discourse across changing social, political, and technological landscapes. Legal communication is increasingly shaped by shifting expectations regarding legitimacy, accessibility, transparency, and public engagement, while emerging technologies and new media environments continue to transform the ways legal authority is constructed and contested. The section welcomes contributions examining the linguistic, rhetorical, and argumentative dimensions of legal discourse in a wide range of institutional settings, including courts, legislatures, international organisations, and administrative bodies. Topics may include judicial rhetoric and dissent, evaluative language in legal reasoning, strategic manoeuvring and persuasion, narrative and framing in legal argumentation, institutional voice and authority, populist and anti-populist legal discourse, human rights communication, and the impact of AI and computational technologies on legal argumentation and legal communication. Particular welcome is given to interdisciplinary and methodologically innovative approaches drawing on legal linguistics, discourse analysis, rhetoric, corpus linguistics, argumentation theory, socio-legal studies, and related fields.

The right to language assistance in legal proceedings is essential for access to justice, placing legal translators and interpreters in a key role. However, persistent structural issues — such as shortages of qualified professionals and uneven professionalisation — continue to affect service quality (Anesa & Cantagalli 2025). These challenges now intersect with rapid technological developments. Tools such as AI-assisted translation, automatic speech recognition, and speech-to-speech systems promise greater efficiency and broader language coverage, but raise concerns about accuracy, accountability, and trust in legal contexts (EULITA 2025; SAFE AI 2025; Peeters et al. 2025; Runyon 2025; Torvatn et al. 2026). Research (e.g., Bowker 2024; Phanthaphoommee et al. 2026; Vieira 2024) also shows that these technologies may blur the boundaries between translation and interpreting, challenging traditional distinctions. This thematic area adopts a human-in-the-loop perspective to explore the evolving landscape of legal translation and interpreting at the intersection of technology, methodology, and practice. Its aim is to contribute to describing professional and training challenges in the field by using either traditional or innovative analytical methodologies. Particular attention will be given to AI-assisted legal translation workflows, legal interpreter agency, power asymmetries, and risks of epistemic injustice in multilingual encounters. References

Artificial intelligence and law share a fundamental common ground: both are inherently language-based. This convergence invites reflection on what the rise of AI means for law as a practice, a set of genres, and a normative system. Language has always shaped the way law is conducted and communicated. Previous major shifts in its linguistic packaging have transformed not only the form but also, to varying degrees, the substance of legal discourse. The transition from the spoken to the written word, and later from written to digital communication, are telling examples of this. The emergence of a new, computationally mediated notion of language raises the same question with renewed urgency: are we witnessing a change in the packaging alone, or something deeper? This thematic area explores the various facets of this process, whether still unfolding or already established, and welcomes contributions that examine how large language models are reshaping legal language, legal reasoning, and legal practice.

The legitimacy of a functioning legal order rests not only upon formally correctly drafted laws and judicial decisions arrived at through formally correct legal procedures, but also upon the ability of citizens to comprehend and accept the law. To this end, legal norms and judgments must be formulated in such a way that they provide guidance and are understandable to the intended recipients. In legal practice, however, a distinct gap is evident between this ideal and (specialised) legal discourses, which are frequently difficult to understand. In this context, incomprehensibility emerges not merely as a communicative problem, but also as a democratic one. Criticism regarding the incomprehensibility of legal language is not a new phenomenon (e.g., Lerch 2004); rather, it is a challenge that has grown over the years – one that legal linguistics addresses from theoretical, methodological, and practical perspectives. The spectrum of studies ranges from comparative linguistic-legal approaches (examining, for example, directives and regulations) to corpus-linguistic, system-linguistic, and text-type-specific analyses (focusing, for instance, on legal contracts and statutes), extending to communication- and popularisation-oriented approaches. These latter approaches examine and describe the relationship between law, language, and communication of texts mediating the law (such as information brochures, ministerial websites, and explanatory videos), and also develop application-oriented solutions (e.g., Breeze/Szczyrbak in press; Felder/Vogel 2017; Luttermann/Engberg 2023, 2025). With the upcoming of artificial intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs), legal communication faces a profound transformation. LLMs generate already summaries or explanatory texts in mere seconds and make them widely accessible (Stodden 2023). Does this mean that automated law is far more understandable to citizens than non-AI-based law? What role do humans play in the production, reception, mediation, and translation of texts to ensure clarity in the law? What potential do language models hold for legal communication that is both comprehensible and appropriate to the subject matter? This panel will focus on these and other related questions. References

Law and justice are no longer confined to courtrooms, statutes, and institutional settings: they are increasingly experienced through streaming platforms, crime fiction, documentaries, podcasts, memes, social media, and other audiovisual and digital environments. Images and opinions of law are circulated through images, sounds, narratives, metaphors, and multimodal forms of representation that shape public understandings of crime, authority, morality, and justice. This thematic area explores the multiple ways in which law, justice, and crime are represented, constructed, negotiated, and mediated across audiovisual, visual, and narrative media. Moving beyond traditional approaches to language in the law, it invites interdisciplinary submissions examining the multimodal dimensions of, including audiovisual resources, metaphor, images, crime fiction, and other forms of cultural representation. This area further invites contributions exploring the interplay between cognition and mediated representations of law and crime across a variety of communicative environments, such as cinema, television, streaming services, videogames, podcasts, and social media. Particular interest will be devoted to issues of multilingual communication, accessibility, and audiovisual transfer, as well as to the ways in which legal and crime-related media engage cognitive and affective processes including perception, emotional response, memory, attention, and meaning-making. The aim is to encourage interdisciplinary discussion of how audiences interpret, process, and experience legal narratives through contemporary multimodal media forms.

Research at the intersection of language and law depends on access to its sources, yet that access is strikingly uneven. Data from the judiciary – court decisions, case files, the everyday textual output of courts and prosecutors – often remains barely accessible or available only under heavy restrictions, leaving much of how law actually works in the dark. In the field of legislation the situation has improved in places, with more statutes and parliamentary materials published openly, but significant blind spots persist: historical layers, subordinate regulation, administrative guidance, political lobbying and the documentary trail behind enacted texts frequently stay out of reach. This raises a question that this thematic area places at its centre: who actually controls access to these data, and on what legal basis is such control exercised? The question has gained new urgency with the rise of "free" AI systems. By appearing to make legal and linguistic knowledge instantly available, they suggest a kind of open access – but de facto they risk becoming unaccountable gatekeepers. Their answers stand in for the sources, while the underlying (training) data, its provenance, and the terms on which it was obtained remain opaque. Accessibility of output is not the same as access to sources. We invite papers and panels addressing, among others: the legal and institutional regimes that govern access to judicial and legislative data; the gap between formal publication and genuine usability; the methodological and ethical stakes of building open corpora of legal language; and the role of AI systems as de facto intermediaries between citizens, scholars, and the law. We welcome theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions, and especially interdisciplinary perspectives connecting linguistics, law, digital humanities, and information science.

The US has been in an escalating series of constitutional crises over the last decade. Analysis at the intersection of law and language of these continuing crises is essential for understanding them. The theme of textual interpretation in times of constitutional crises will explore such sub-themes as the following: • Corpus linguistics in constitutional crises: how corpus methods reshape "ordinary meaning" in high-stakes constitutional disputes (e.g., Second Amendment, elections, impeachment, emergency powers, nondelegation); • Original public meaning and semantic theory: how semantic theory (fixation, polysemy, vagueness, implicature) interacts with original public meaning in constitutional crises; • Text, democracy, and emergency powers: how courts interpret constitutional text during democratic stress — contested elections, emergency powers, executive overreach, and breakdowns in institutional norms.

It is an obvious fact that researchers working on Law and Language adopt (explicitly or implicitly) different philosophical assumptions, apply different methodologies, and approach research problems from different perspectives. Those who are more philosophically oriented either follow the philosophical tradition of ordinary language philosophy or apply formal methods elaborated in the reconstructionist trend in the philosophy of language. Those who look at Law and Language from the perspective of linguistics have a choice between traditional structuralist approaches and the accounts proposed by cognitive linguistics. Researchers looking at Law and Language from the perspective of the social sciences use the conceptual apparatuses and methods of the sociology of language, sociolinguistics, communication science, and so on. The purpose of this thematic area will be to compare various approaches, discuss their strengths and weaknesses, investigate their compatibility, and reflect on the possibilities for mutual cooperation. Papers presenting general accounts of particular approaches, general comparisons of different approaches, and papers discussing the application of various approaches to specific problems of Law and Language are all welcome.