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By looking at the decisions of the United States Supreme Court, this chapter argues that what characterises American judicial discourse is precisely the fact it integrates its formalist and its policy-oriented discourses in a single discursive space: the judicial opinion. This characteristic American discursive integration is illustrated by analysing two particularly clear and recurrent series of examples: Supreme Court decisions that establish and apply multi-pronged judicial tests, and those that engage in ‘plain meaning’ judicial debates. This chapter examines the discursive mechanisms by which American judicial argument integrates or fuses its more formalist and its more policy-oriented discourses in the single space of the judicial opinion, and presents the significant argumentative tensions and distrust that are produced by this somewhat forced discursive coexistence. U.S. Supreme Court opinions almost never use either the term ‘formalism’ or the term ‘policy’ except to denounce them as inappropriate modes of judicial interpretation. American judicial discourse therefore walks a narrow argumentative tightrope: it must simultaneously promote and critique the two modes of discourse that it deploys side-by-side in its judicial opinions.

This chapter argues that the Cour de cassation of France, the Supreme Court of the United States, and the European Court of Justice are truly emblematic courts, courts whose discursive practices and conceptual frameworks characterise those of their respective judicial systems. Each of these three judicial systems possesses defining conceptual structures and discursive practices that go a long way towards making those systems what they are. What makes the French judicial system French, the European system European, and the American system American are formal, discursive, and conceptual attributes that manifest themselves throughout those judicial systems, attributes that surface again and again despite the obvious variation in the parties, the subject matter, the legal issues, and the like handled by the assorted courts in question. This chapter compares the judicial discourses of the three courts as well as their judicial argumentation and judicial decisions.

Like the Cour de cassation of France, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) maintains two different judicial discourses, that of its judicial decisions, and that of its Advocates General (AGs). However, the ECJ puts an important twist on its French predecessor: it publishes both discourses in every decided case. The ECJ's simultaneous publication practice obviously produces a serious effect on the types of judicial arguments and reasoning that are deployed in each sphere. Both discourses are public discourses; the disjunction between the two is therefore available for all to see. Perhaps as a result, the ECJ approach softens the bifurcation to a significant extent: neither discourse takes as pure a form as does its French counterpart. Although still highly magisterial and deductive, the collegial ECJ decision does not rival the oracular syllogisms of the Cour de cassation's judicial decision. Although the ECJ's Reporting Judges and AGs adopt explicitly purposive and teleological interpretive approaches, they do not tend to deploy the kind of free-wheeling judicial argumentation oriented towards equiy and substantive justice that characterises so much of the hidden French judicial discursive sphere.

This chapter describes the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the highest court in the judicial system of the European Union. On the one hand, the ECJ generates official judicial decisions that consist of relatively short, deductive and magisterial judgments that are highly reminiscent of their French counterparts. On the other hand, the ECJ's judicial magistrates — and in particular its Advocates General — also routinely deploy a purposive or ‘teleological’ form of interpretation that stresses the more socially oriented goals of judicial interpretation. In short, the ECJ demonstrates a bifurcated form of judicial discourse that reproduces in large measure the French judicial system's own discursive bifurcation. What characterises and distinguishes ECJ argumentation is the public bifurcation of the Court's discourse. The ECJ publishes multiple judicial and quasi-judicial documents, including the official decision, the Opinion of the Advocate General, and (at least until recently) the Report of the Reporting Judge. This publication practice profoundly affects the discourses deployed by the ECJ and its interlocutors, leading to a particular and distinctive form of embattled judicial reasoning and argumentation.

The opening chapter provides the theoretical and contextual background to the book and introduces the rationale for the sections and for the themes that re-occur throughout the papers. After a brief introduction to the notion of textual travel, it outlines some of the issues relating to the notion of ‘legal-lay’ or ‘lay-legal’ communication. It then explores in some detail the genesis of textual travel notions in the interdisciplinary research literature. Next it outlines the topics and themes explored in each of the four substantive sections: police investigation as textual mediation; the legal case as intertextual construction; judicial discourse as legal recontextualization; and crossing cultural and ideological categories in lay-legal communication. Finally, it considers the long travels of the book itself.

By examining the discourse of legal and non-legal communicators across a variety of venues as participants forwarded arguments about a specific issue ? the Lewis v Harris issue of whether or not same-sex marriage should be legal ? Tracy and Delgadillo evidence the problematic character of the legal-lay distinction. They look closely at oral and written discourses of New Jersey State Supreme Court judges and attorneys, lay speakers and lobbying groups, and elected officials, showing which features and facets of whose discourse traveled across contexts. They find that whether a party is marginalized or mainstream is a better predictor of narrative use than whether they are a legal or lay speaker. In particular, when a legal issue involves how a category of person ought to be treated then stories become a useful tool for overcoming otherness.

It traces the discourse on freedom of expression in postcolonial idea, the security imperatives of the state, the political history of the law of sedition post-Independence and its journey within the courts. Through this, an attempt at conceptualizing public order, security of state and other grounds along which the act of sedition is penalized, is made. This chapter begins with debates on sedition within the Constituent Assembly and systematically takes these debates to the higher courts in India employing legal hermeneutics to read into the judgements and deduce a theory of sedition coming from the judiciary. The chapter treats the judicial pronouncements as contributing to the study of sedition as a speech act to identify what emerges as the crime of sedition within the legal-juridical regime in India.