Literature as a tool for teaching legal culture: the jury court portrayed in Guy de Maupassant’s short stories

The paper presents the approach to teaching the legal cultureme during seminars on specialized languages. The concept of the court with jurors, as reflected in several short stories by the French author Guy de Maupassant, is given as an example. Literary works often possess a clear documentary value, standing out as a radiography of the mentalities, morals, and legal and judicial realities of a given era. In the introduction, we define the legal cultureme as a unit carrying cultural information and present the specifics of the court with jurors in France. We then review how the trial conducted within the court with jurors is portrayed in Maupassant’s short stories, as well as the terminological and cultural comprehension difficulties found in the texts. The final part of the paper is dedicated to the typologies of the defendants and the crimes they committed. Humor, irony, and sarcasm are intrinsic features of Maupassant’s style, and these can be further explored together with the students