This conceptual paper introduces the Legal Language Zone (LLZ) as a framework for analysing professional legal correspondence in the age of artificial intelligence. Drawing on the Businesslike Zone from business communication pedagogy, the LLZ is theorised as a multidimensional communicative continuum structured by six interrelated dimensions: text organisation and structural cohesion; lexical specificity and terminological precision; politeness and relational distance; correctness; professional credibility; and anticipatory interpretation and strategic indeterminacy. The framework adapts the communicative calibration underlying the Businesslike Zone to the interpretive, and strategic demands of legal communication. The paper examines how large language models (LLMs) may both support and destabilise communication within the LLZ. It argues that AI can enhance drafting efficiency, structural consistency, terminological precision, and surface-level correctness, while remaining limited in context-sensitive interpretation, strategic judgment, and anticipation of future interpretive consequences. Particular attention is given to legal indeterminacy and the distinction between strategic interpretive openness and unintended ambiguity. These limitations raise questions of professional responsibility, accountability, and supervision, particularly as AI develops towards more autonomous forms of agency. The paper therefore argues for a collaborative rather than substitutive model of human–AI drafting in which legal professionals retain responsibility for contextual interpretation, communicative risk, ethical judgment, and professional accountability.
This paper examines the political-philosophical values shaping Greek citizenship law and policy and how they institutionalized norms of inclusion, exclusion, civic worth, and equality within the democratic community. Using discourse analysis, it treats citizenship policies not merely as legal instruments but as expressions of underlying philosophical commitments that structure society’s understanding of membership and regulate access to rights. The study has two main objectives: to identify the dominant philosophical frameworks influencing political and legal commitments and institutional practices, and to explore the relationship between citizenship policies and the principles of property-based liberalism and conservatism, on one hand, and liberal egalitarianism, on the other. Findings show that Greece has historically followed an ethnic-based (ius sanguinis) approach. Reforms proposed in 2010 and enacted in 2015 partially adopted an ius soli model aligned with liberal egalitarian ideals, aiming to reduce social and economic inequalities and foster inclusion for second-generation residents. In contrast, 2020 reforms reflect a return to property-liberal and conservative values, emphasizing financial criteria, national identity, and tradition, thereby reinforcing ius sanguinis and linking economic status to civic worth. The study highlights the tension between egalitarian inclusion and conservative-exclusionary principles, showing how philosophical values shape legal frameworks and the symbolic construction of membership.
This article examines hedging as a source of unclarity in Korean lower‑court civil judgments and analyzes how an institutional AI system introduced by the Supreme Court Library of Korea in 2025 translates these hedging devices into English. Building mainly on Hyland’s framework, the study identifies discoursal hedging linked to integrated findings‑of‑fact sections, macro‑structural hedging arising from inverted syllogistic and tail‑final reasoning patterns, micro‑structural hedging involving agentless passives and impersonal subjects, and a range of lexical and formulaic hedges, many influenced by Japanese judgment phraseology. Unlike U.S. trial‑court practice, where hedging has been shown to operate as a deliberate, judge‑specific strategy to minimize reversal risk, hedging in Korean judgments is largely institutionalized through the 1998 Recommendations on the Drafting of Judgments and judgment‑writing manuals issued by the Judicial Research and Training Institute, and thus functions predominantly as norm‑governed, reader‑oriented practice. A small corpus study of AI‑generated English translations of selected civil judgments shows that the system tends to mirror the complex structural hedging of the Korean originals and to render key lexical and formulaic hedges in divergent ways, thereby obscuring gradations in fact‑finding and creating interpretive difficulties for foreign readers. The article argues that improving the handling of hedging in institutional AI translation requires both refinements to Korean judgment‑drafting conventions and explicit, consistently applied translation guidelines within a human‑in‑the‑loop quality‑assurance framework.
The American system of psychiatric diagnosis, embodied in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and the modern project of International Criminal Justice may be regarded as twin progeny of the cataclysmic violence which marked the twentieth century. Both emerged as institutionalised, taxonomic responses to the trauma of World War II, each was reconfigured by the Cold War's ideological pressures and the specific moral crises of the Vietnam War, and these classificatory infrastructures converged in the 1990s with the establishment of ad hoc international tribunals. The article traces how these parallel systems of categorisation – one nosological, one juridical—developed distinct yet interrelated epistemic frameworks for addressing core international crimes. It focusses on the critical asymmetry that signifies their application: whilst psychiatric categories, particularly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), have been expansively adopted by the international criminal courts and tribunals, to validate victim testimony, the same classificatory systems have been largely restricted from addressing perpetrator culpability. This selective adoption reveals the situated and contingent dimensions of classificatory infrastructures: indeed, categorisation stands not a neutral technical exercise but as a socio-political process, where the exigencies of legal accountability, epistemic rigour, and normative clarity are mobilised to negotiate and circumscribe the potentially disruptive psychological continuum between victim and perpetrator.
This article approaches dissenting opinions at the Turkish Constitutional Court (TCC) as a counter-discourse: an attempt, from inside the constitution’s own vocabulary, to contest the majority’s reading of the law. We ask how the rhetoric of dissent changes as the court is recomposed during democratic backsliding, and how that change relates to the turnover of the bench. Combining close reading with a corpus-scale analysis of 3,534 dissents (2012–2026), it advances a corpus-assisted legal semiotics grounded in Hyland’s stance markers (boosters and hedges). The corpus establishes two changes. First, the rhetoric of dissent grows measurably less assertive: boosters of certainty thin while hedges rise, roughly halving the booster-to-hedge ratio. Second, this shift is associated above all with who writes the dissents: the court’s three appointment cohorts (appointed by the pre-AKP presidents, under President Abdullah Gül, and under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) fall in a monotone order of assertiveness, confirmed by a judge-level trend test though on few judges, and the assertive cohort falls to zero authored dissents from 2021, so the change in stance coincides with a change in authorship; the data do not show a doctrinal refutation. Legal semiotics then supplies the framework for exploring the constitutional significance of that conjunction. We propose compositional silencing as an analytic reading of it, offered for comparative testing rather than established as a causal mechanism: the counter-discourse remains in the archive while the community that spoke it leaves the bench. It is set against the institutional silencing of courts such as Jordan’s, where dissent is never recorded.
Apex courts and regional human-rights tribunals decline to recognize the legal claims of indigenous peoples far more often than they accept them. The rare judgments in which they do are celebrated as constitutional landmarks, and are often followed by sustained administrative inaction rather than implementation. This article re-describes that compliance gap as a semiotic translation failure. It situates the gap as the second movement of a single semiotic process whose first movement is the more common failure of recognition itself. The argument draws on Patrick Glenn’s chthonic legal tradition, Mattias Åhrén’s critique of Westphalian sovereignty, Robert A. Williams Jr.’s genealogy of conquest discourse and recovery of indigenous treaty visions, Juri Lotman’s semiosphere, and Roberta Kevelson’s Peircean account of legal semiosis. Together these show that the state administrative apparatus operates within a sign-system not built to receive the relational, place-based signs of indigenous law. The article identifies four coordinated mechanisms by which state institutions arrest the semiotic growth of court rulings: hyper-narrow literalism, temporal drag, the re-assertion of the “smooth system,” and discursive re-conquest. It illustrates them through four landmark cases: Fosen (Norway, 2021), Sarayaku v. Ecuador (IACtHR, 2012), Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia (Canada, 2014), and the African Court’s Ogiek decision (2017, with reparations in 2022). Decolonizing law cannot be achieved through favourable judgments alone; it requires restructuring the state’s administrative sign-system, of which the treaty-vision tradition offers an articulated indigenous example.
This article analyses the semiotic–legal phenomena accompanying the Russian institutional framework of strategic planning as defined in the 2014 Federal Law “On Strategic Planning in the Russian Federation”. From the perspective of doctrinal legal scholarship, this act can hardly be regarded as a particularly significant innovation within the Russian legal system. Nevertheless, it is of crucial importance for of that legal system’s semiotic environment. Within this environment, it brings about profound modifications in the semiosis of the legal norm, establishes a new pragmatic perspective in the reception of both individual legal texts and the system as a whole, and sets interpretative frameworks for the relations between the legal system, the legislative process, and governance. Finally, it constitutes an instrument through which the textual universe of the legal system becomes systemically open to ideological and mythological narratives present in political discourse, thereby forming a distinct site of coupling between the discourses of politics and law. The article examines how this coupling functions and what effects it produces. It argues that, although the system of strategic planning does not fundamentally alter the formal architecture of public authority, it significantly transforms the dynamics of legal semiosis. In particular, it operates as a system for the transmission of political narratives originating from the highest level of executive power, thereby rendering lower-level actors co-senders within an official political-ideological discourse. In this process, political postulates are translated into blurred norms that condition both the implementation and the perceived legitimacy of explicit legal norms.
This article develops the Open Question Dialectic (OQD), a metajurisprudential framework for analyzing how legal discourse regulates interrogative challenges. Rather than focusing on the truth or validity of legal propositions, the OQD examines which challenges legal practices admit as proper internal moves, redirect elsewhere, or block from uptake. It distinguishes compliance-open questions from status-open questions and introduces the concepts of weak and strong rejection, erosion, and escalation to explain shifts in the structure of legal discourse. The framework is then applied to leading jurisprudential theories, showing that they differ not only in what they count as law, but also in how they organize closure and reopening within legal reasoning. The article argues that the OQD provides a new comparative dimension for jurisprudence by revealing distinct architectures of legal discourse that remain invisible when theories are compared solely through their criteria of legal validity or their accounts of the relation between law and morality.
This article argues that the Latvian controversy surrounding the Istanbul Convention cannot be understood merely as a disagreement over women’s rights, domestic violence policy, or the correct translation of the English term “gender.” Rather, it reveals a broader semiotic conflict over the legal meaning of gender itself. In Latvian legal and political discourse, the term dzimums carries both biological and social meanings, while dzimte has emerged as a marked and contested attempt to render the sociological dimension of gender visible. This linguistic ambiguity has allowed “gender” to become detached from its treaty-specific function—explaining socially constructed roles that sustain violence against women—and re-signified as a symbol of ideological threat, moral disorder, and perceived foreign imposition. Through a qualitative legal-semiotic analysis, the article traces how “gender” was translated, contested, and re-signified in Latvian law and public debate.
Vietnamese law declares that land belongs to the entire people, with the State acting as representative owner and exercising unified management. This article reads that formula as a legal-semiotic construction of ownership without an operative owner-subject. Drawing on legal semiotics and Hohfeldian analysis, it distinguishes between the legal sign of ownership and the jural subject capable of owning. The owner-sign performs three linked operations: it anchors land in collective constitutional ownership, displaces operative agency to State institutions, and permits patrimonial circulation through land-use rights. State institutions make the ownership formula legally operative, while land-use rights function as substitute proprietary signs through registration, certification, civil-law asset coding and market circulation. Land recovery is the stress point because the ownership formula returns to authorise public action while the named owner remains unable to act as owner. The Vietnamese case reveals a broader jurisprudential problem: legal language may produce the sign of ownership while withholding the jural agency normally associated with an owner.
This paper explores the constitutional memories and constitutional memory politics in the history of Bulgarian constitutionalism. This is done through the prism of constitutional imaginaries and via constitutional semiotic methodology and approach. The paper defines the concept of memory constitutionalism. It relates it to the concepts of transitional constitutionalism and constitutional memories. It explores how constitutional memories are semiotically signified and represented in textual, symbolicimaginary, visual, and performative constitutionalism. The paper analyses the signification of constitutional memories in all four Bulgarian constitutions. It explores the constitutional imaginary and constitutional semiotic strategies for the creation and sustaining of authority, legitimacy, and obedience in Bulgarian constitutionalism. Using predominantly retrospective approach the paper aims to outline the features of memory constitutionalism in Bulgaria. The paper exposes the symbolic-imaginary austerity of the Tarnovo Constitution that is paralleled by the socio-legal creation of semiotic imaginary bridges with the Western Modernity and the Bulgarian past. It shows the pragmatic, non-emotional way of imposition of the communist narrative by the 1947 Constitution paralleled by a semiotic revolution on societal level. It explores the 1971 Constitution and its belated symbolic-imaginary glorification of the revolutionary past. Last but not least, the paper analyses the stretching of the 1991 Constitution between the semiotic universalism and pragmatic coping with the national constitutional past.
The principle of fair labelling holds that offence labels should accurately reflect the nature of the defendant's wrongdoing. This article considers that fair labelling may also unveil implicit conceptions of the infringed subject. For offences against persons, labels can reveal information about how personhood is defined, as these definitions shape what the law can recognise as wrongs against persons. Through examining image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) and other non-contact offences, this article considers whether criminal law may reveal a shift in how constitutional democracies implicitly define personhood. Atomistic personhood—defining persons through embodied rational capacity—creates recognition problems for non-contact offences because conduct not affecting body or mind cannot readily be recognised as direct person-infringement. Persons are inherently relational beings. This affects what harms and wrongs us: I would rather break a bone than lose a loved one. The systematic reclassification of IBSA from defamation to sexual offence, alongside parallel shifts for coercive control, stalking, and other nonphysical, technology-facilitated harms, is consistent with implicit movement toward a relational definition of personhood as a theoretical foundation. This article explores that possibility as one explanation for these labelling patterns. As digital technologies increasingly mediate how persons exist in the world, whether non-physical harms can be recognised as serious wrongs against persons depends on how personhood is defined. Attending carefully to the labels attached to offences, and to how those labels shift, could help make these foundational commitments visible and subject to critical evaluation.
Juries play a critical role in determining trial verdicts. One major challenge jurors face is interpreting legal texts that include polysemous words: terms that have multiple meaning senses. Not all polysemous terms are equally problematic. Corpus-based methods offer a principled means of identifying which terms genuinely risk misinterpretation, and which carry a stable enough meaning to remain accessible to lay people. Building on recent advances in legal corpus linguistics [1], the present study applies corpus-based sense-tagging to jury instructions. The noun fault was selected as the unit of analysis due to its polysemous nature across legal and general registers. All word forms and inflections of fault were identified, and their frequencies were recorded in both the Model Utah Jury Instructions (MUJI) [2] corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Psycholinguistic recognition data (reaction times from a lexical decision task) were also consulted to assess the accessibility of fault to lay people. The study triangulates frequency data, dictionary meaning senses, and manually tagged concordance lines to identify dominant meaning senses and determine where overlap or divergence occurs. (Inter-rater agreement was assessed to ensure consistency across two human raters.)Unlike extensionalist/reference-based approaches that rely on co-occurrence frequencies alone, this method places human raters at the center of meaning classification, providing a transparent and replicable ground truth for legal word meaning. The analysis shows that the noun fault maintains a consistent meaning across legal and non-legal registers. Overall, this study contributes to the growing field of legal corpus linguistics by demonstrating how corpus-based sense-tagging can help identify whether a given legal term poses a genuine interpretive risk, and by showing that in the case of fault, its dominant meaning is sufficiently stable to be accessible to lay people. The human-validated methodology proposed here also offers a potential ground truth benchmark for evaluating computational models of legal meaning [3]. It should be noted that direct juror testing remains a necessary next step.
The rapid evolution of digital technology and the advent of new AI tools compel contemporary legal education to rethink how it prepares law students for the digital age, emphasizing the need for lifelong learning in an increasingly dynamic information ecosystem. This requirement means prioritizing not only the development of core legal skills, but also contextual supplemental skills needed for an effective human–machine interaction. To investigate the multifaceted nature of AI literacy among law students, this paper draws on a qualitative empirical study that probes the attitudes and experiences of faculty members integrating AI into the law classroom. The results highlight the need for a holistic approach to developing institutional policies and curricular strategies that integrate AI literacy into legal education. The authors hence propose a conceptual framework for legal education competencies, mapping the intersection of core legal skills, contextual information literacy, terminological competence, and AI (legal) literacy.
Over the last decades, conflicts surrounding the implementation of large-scale infrastructural and energy projects have made visible significant transformations in the relationship between law, power, and dissent. Drawing on the analysis of the No TAV movement in Val di Susa and the No TAP movement in Apulia, this article examines the role of legal, administrative, and security practices in shaping specific forms of governing conflict. Building on Michel Foucault’s genealogical perspective and his analysis of the Nu-pieds Sedition developed in Penal Theories and Institutions, the article approaches the event as an analytical entry point to investigate the ways in which power redefines its techniques of intervention when confronted with persistent forms of collective opposition. The analysis highlights a progressive shift from the centrality of criminal law towards a broader articulation of administrative, preventive, and security dispositifs aimed at regulating the conditions under which conflict takes shape. From this perspective, law emerges as a technique of government that participates in defining the boundaries of political legitimacy and transforming the relations between governing and governed subjects. The cases analysed thus shed light on how counter-conducts trigger a reorganization of the modalities through which power is exercised, revealing the process through which specific legal techniques for governing conflict are formed, transformed, and progressively sedimented.
This article examines the decision of the Superior Court of Justice (STJ) in Recurso no Mandado de Segurança No. 70.411/RJ, which granted the family of Brazilian councilwoman Marielle Franco access to documents from the police investigation into her assassination. Marielle, a Black, lesbian woman from the favelas and a prominent symbol of resistance against racism and patriarchy in Brazil, was a human rights defender whose killing exposed Brazil’s structural failures in protecting those who challenge entrenched systems of violence left over from the colonial era. The case raised critical questions regarding Brazil’s compliance with international human rights obligations, particularly the standards established by the Minnesota Protocol, the UN Human Rights Committee’s General Comment No. 36, and the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) concerning victims’ rights and the duty to conduct effective, independent, and transparent investigations. Furthermore, it symbolized the enduring legacy of colonial domination and its contemporary expression through necropolitics. Methodologically, the article conducts a qualitative analysis of the STJ ruling, exploring how international instruments were invoked to justify victims’ participation in criminal investigations and to reinforce the diffuse control of conventionality within the Brazilian legal system. The discussion highlights the structural obstacles that continue to hinder accountability in cases involving state and parastatal violence in the Global South context, assessing whether the decision constitutes a meaningful institutional shift. Ultimately, the article argues that the ruling represents an important, though limited, step toward aligning Brazil’s investigative practices with international standards and strengthening the protection of victims’ rights in contexts of human rights violations.
This paper examines the complex legal challenges arising from the establishment of human settlements on the Moon, distinguishing between short-term research facilities and permanent habitations. Through comprehensive analysis of existing international space law, particularly the Outer Space Treaty and other relevant instruments, this study identifies critical gaps in the regulatory framework governing sovereignty, property rights, nationality, jurisdiction, liability, environmental protection, and dispute resolution. As lunar settlement transitions from speculation to imminent reality, the inadequacies of current legal architecture threaten to undermine peaceful cooperation and equitable resource utilization. This paper proposes pathways toward developing a sustainable legal regime capable of addressing both immediate operational concerns and long-term constitutional questions inherent in extraterrestrial human presence. The paper is grounded in the belief that the existing legal framework is capable, up to a certain extent, to deal with the issues emerging in the context of short-term missions, while it appears largely inadequate to handle problems arising within long-term settlements. This appraisal leads the author to conclude that, at some point in the future, it might be necessary for the international community to reconsider the functionality and flexibility of the existing legal framework applicable to lunar activities and to elaborate a new set of rules specifically designed to address challenges that were foreseen when the space treaties were drafted.
