The Language of Jury Trial

Download or read book The Language of Jury Trial written by C. Heffer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-11-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on representative corpora of transcripts from over 100 English criminal jury trials, this stimulating new book explores the nature of 'legal-lay discourse', or the language used by legal professionals before lay juries. Careful analyses of genres such as witness examination and the judge's summing-up reveal a strategic tension between a desire to persuade the jury and the need to conform to legal constraints. The book also suggests ways of managing this tension linguistically to help, not hinder, the jury.