Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

20The author argues that the language of the law is to be distinguished from othertypes of legal language, as, for example, the language used in the courtroom, thelanguage of legal textbooks, the language used to talk about the law in a formal as wellas in an informal setting. According to this hypothesis, legislation, contracts and deedsare text genres that fit in a category other than the category to which judgments belong.Reasons for the differences between these kinds of texts reside in the socio-pragmaticaspects underlying the notion of genre. For instance, legislative texts (acts, statutes,bills) have higher regulative functions than deeds. Doctrinal texts (legal textbooks) haveno regulative function, but rather an informative one. Judicial texts (judgments, orders,decisions) have verdictive functions (e.g. to acquit, to convict) which consist in ―thedelivering of a finding, official or unofficial, upon evidence or reasons as to value orfact, so far as these are distinguishable‖ (Austin, 1962: 152 (cited by Trosborg 1995)).More recently, legal discourse has been classified by taking into account thelegal and linguistic system in which it is produced. Orts Llopis (2009) proposes thefollowing classification of legal genres in the Common Law (Figure 3). According tothe author, there are three types of written legal discourse that are related to theconceptual organization of the subject field of law: discourse on public law, discourseon private law and the discourse of doctrine and jurisprudence. Some text genres aretypical of a given type of discourse and may only be produced in that context forpragmatic reasons related to the conceptualization of the subject field. For example,wills are a private legal instrument that cannot be enacted as statutes can. They can thusbe said to be separate legal genres.This kind of classification of legal genres is interesting because it is based on thelegal system in which they are produced and, as a result, it allows one to identifydifferences in legal genres typologies across nations. The same author also presents aclassification of legal genres used in Civil Law Spain and identifies differences between