Abstract This editorial introduces a special issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics on corpus perspectives on legal discourse. It first situates corpus-based research within the broader empirical tradition of language and law studies, tracing the emergence of a ‘corpus turn’ from the mid-1990s onwards and its contribution to the analysis of legal texts. It then identifies established and emerging trends exemplified by the five studies in the issue, which span jurisdictions in Europe, North America and Asia and draw on both common law and civil law traditions. Four trends are discussed: the continued dominance of written legal discourse as the core object of corpus analysis; comparison as a foundational methodological design principle; the role of intertextuality, interdiscursivity and genre networks in situating legal texts within broader institutional and societal contexts; and the spectrum from impersonal, informational legal language to more involved, evaluative discourse in judicial settings.
David Wright (Thu,) studied this question.