The law and critical discourse studies

ABSTRACT

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. (Jacques Anatole François Thibault)

KEYWORDS:

• Critical discourse studies
• law
• language
• ideology
• politics

Introduction

The liberal view of the law and legal processes is that they are part of maintaining civil society (Cotterrell, 1984). The law comprises a rational set of rules and procedure that seek to treat all individuals in the same way (Allan, 2001). Here, the law strives to deal with facts, is objective and fair and, in a sense, is above or outside of, or disembodied from, society (Slaughter, 2000). In other words, it should not reflect the interests, motivations, ideas and values of specific parties in that society. It is thought to be a fundamental component in protecting both the individual and civil society. The law, here, involves a claim to provide a system of compromises, on the one hand giving people rights and power to carry on with their lives, but on the other to regulate them from preventing others to do the same (Hayek, 2012).

There are also critical views of the law. For example, a crude Marxist stance is that the law simply protects the powerful and their interests and the capitalist system of exploitation (Holdren & Tucker, 2020). And much good evidence can be presented to make such a case. Global corporations are able to produce systematic misery around the world, seemingly supported by international law (Cotal San Martin & Machin, 2020; Mayr & Machin, 2012). Prison inmates around the world are from poorer sections of society or from marginalized ethnic groups, all trapped in cycles of poverty (Hinton, 2016; Rabuy & Kopf, 2016; Western & Muller, 2013). Sentencing patterns and other processes that comprise the criminal justice system in these societies are highly discriminatory against individuals of lower social economic status (Van Eijk, 2017), whose lives might best be described as difficult and brutish, with highly limited access to education, the employment market, good social infrastructure and other resources as well as to knowledge about the law (Mayr & Machin, 2012). Many studies, particularly in the field of the Sociology of Law, explore other forms of specific inequalities built into the law, legal processes and decision making (Sandefur, 2008; Seron & Munger, 1996).

Another perspective suggests something slightly subtler. The law, by also offering what in some cases is indeed a set of compromises (Cheng & Cheng, 2012) that can include things like workers’ rights and human rights, is one way that the present system appears as legitimate, fair and equal (MacKinnon, 2010). Laws do change as interest groups lobby to re-frame issues, as in cases of civil rights (Martin, 1998) and sexual harassment (Marshall, 2005). In this view, the law and the concessions that it gives can be seen as part of how an economic order maintains its sense of consensus and legitimacy, by also providing some elements of broader rights and protection (Hunt, 1993).

This subtler view, influenced greatly by the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and later by Michel Foucault, calls us to reject both the view that laws exist solely as a system of rational rules, external to society, and that it is simply a top-down instrument of the powerful. Rather, the law interrelates with prevailing and dominant ideas and values about what is acceptable, or unacceptable, conduct and behavior in society (Donoghue, 2009). The law is infused into the microprocesses of society, policed and moralized through the professionals of major institutions, in schools, medicine, news media. The Law may appear as simply a formal instrument that serves to enforce wider consensual ideas and values regarding the boundaries of acceptable and desirable conduct, yet it interrelates with all dominant forms of knowledge and how people are positioned and processed in societies (Turkel, 1990). There may be the possibility for change, but only within existing systems of power (Golder & Fitzpatrick, 2013)

Critical discourse studies and the law

Given Critical Discourse Studies’ (CDS) interest in the role of language and communication in the functioning of society, in particular as regards to matters of justice and injustice and the exercise of power and control, it is notable that there has been much less attention to the analysis of the language of law. There is an important and rich body of literature on legal processes emerging from the sub-field of Stylistics known as Forensic Linguistics (Coulthard et al., 2010; Solan & Tiersma, 2004), but this is focused more on dynamics of language use as evidence, and in interactions in legal processes, their fairness and appropriate functioning, rather than on understanding law and its use in the context of wider discourses in societies.

There is also a more modest, yet strong, collection of papers with an interest in law, ideology and language, from a literary and cultural studies perspective in the journal Law Text Culture. These look at the representation of law, for example, in fiction, theater, strip-cartoons and personal narratives, usually with an Australian perspective and an interest in indigenous law and experiences of Law. Such work, as with wider work on the Sociology of Law and Forensic linguistics, provide important points of reference for studies of the law in CDS.

From the perspective of CDS, the law, like any form of language, carries ideas and values. The language of the law classifies the world and represents identities and human agency. The law shapes, legitimizes and naturalizes social practices. This language formalizes and naturalizes discourses disseminated by other institutions in society, such as government, the media, schools, welfare, immigration agencies, the family (Fairclough, 1989; Flowerdew & Richardson, 2017; Kress, 1985).

In CDS, as with any other instances of communication, we might want to ask what kinds of things are regulated and how, what is represented as desirable or undesirable? What kinds of freedoms are protected and in what contexts? The law may indeed involve a system of compromises, but what are the details of these? Given the nature of language, we certainly would not assume the law to be some kind of rational code somehow existing ‘above’ or external to the society where it is applied. But nor might we want to take a crude critical view. As Foucault (1980) argued, we may want to avoid making prejudgments about power, but rather aim to carry out careful investigation of individual situations. The papers in this special edition are all concerned with these kinds of questions, in relation to such specific cases.

For a number of reasons, critical researchers may feel overly cautious about engaging with the law. For one thing, the stylistic features of law are off-putting. It is comprised of archaic words and uses of Latin. We find both words with highly flexible meanings and also where there appears to be excessive attention to extremely precise definitions which in itself can become highly obfuscating (Melinkoff, 1963) leading to long, convoluted sentences that seem to repeat themselves (Bhatia, 1993). Such language is explained by some as being necessary for precision and for technical purposes, but to others such language must be viewed more critically as part of a creation of a mystification of law (Cotterrell, 1984), in part legitimizing the power of both the legal profession and the nature of the legal system as a whole (Galanter, 1974).

Another feature of law that can be off-putting for a researcher beginning to work in the area is its self-referential nature. This relates to how each part can reference, and be legitimized by other parts, suggesting a unified, consistent and logical whole (Goodrich, 1990). In each instance, the meaning of a particular law can seem evasive and immediately spread out to the case law that has built up through its use in the courts. For Cotterrell (1984), this sense of a comprehensive system of law, with its dense language, is part of what helps to bring it a sense of being that is natural, rather than value based. It makes it seem inescapable and inevitable. And it lends to the idea that the practice of law is a kind of ‘craft’, based on a rational system based on accumulated wisdom of the archive of legal judgments (p18). Our aim in this introduction is to consider how a discourse analyst, lacking specific legal training in domains of the law, can nevertheless ask meaningful questions about the law in regard to the discourses it carries. The papers in this special edition then, each in slightly different ways, show how this can be accomplished in specific cases.

The law as language

From the position of CDS, whatever the style of legal language, it can be seen like any other language. CDS is interested in the functioning of any instance of language in politics and in society as a whole. Language is never neutral, even where, as in the law, there may be a striving to give the appearance of being so. And even the criticism of the obscure nature of legal language could be rather a distraction from how it in fact represents persons, events, causalities, priorities, and responsibilities in words and grammar.

To illustrate what we mean, we start with an example using an extract from one of the agreements from the World Trade Organization (WTO), which forms the legal framework governing members’ conduct. This particular agreement is in relation to agriculture and lays out the rules for member nations:

to provide for substantial progressive reductions in agricultural support and protection sustained over an agreed period of time, resulting in correcting and preventing restrictions and distortions in world agricultural markets

There has been much criticism of the WTO in the context of its policies, designed to liberalize economies, opening them to free-trade. Many see the WTO as simply part of allowing powerful global corporations free reign around the planet, even if national governments see benefits from the influx of foreign capital (Rayner et al., 2008). Setting these aside for a moment, we can look at the language used to represent the requirements of the WTO members in regard to agriculture. The agreement here represents the members as being party to ‘correcting’ and ‘preventing’ what are defined as ‘distortions’ in world agricultural markets.

The use of the word ‘correcting’ here relates to where members must open themselves to free trade and to global corporations. It is not presented as ‘intervening’, ‘modifying’ or ‘controlling’. ‘Correcting’, of course, sounds like a good thing. And in this case, the ‘distortion’ being corrected, would be situations where national governments seek to protect or subsidize established local systems of production and trade, for example, in the case of small-scale peasant farmers.

In terms of CDS, with its interest in grammar, we can note that ‘protection’ here is presented as a noun rather than a verb. In CDS it has been shown how using noun forms like this is one way to conceal clear formulations of who is doing what to whom and with what outcomes. The lack of clarity here conceals what exactly is being protected, which in this case would mean free trade and the corporations who benefit from it.

In fact, agriculture has been one the most widely criticized domains of WTO activity (Hartwick & Peet, 2003). Critics have shown how the spread of neoliberal regulation and free trade principles around the planet in regard to agriculture has given unprecedented power to the handful of transnational megacorporations that own and control the global food industry (von Oelreich & Milestad, 2017). This has also led to increasing concentrations of land ownership and given more power to the global supermarkets in regard to pricing and over what is to be produced, where and when (Hamilton, 2018; Holt Giménez & Shattuck, 2011; Lorr, 2020). Agricultural production in Global South countries can be quickly transformed and steered to respond to changing consumer demand in wealthier countries, which may be in part driven by marketing and food trends, such as the rise of demand for soya products and exotic foods. Coming back to the noun ‘protection’ here, we can perhaps think a little more about what, or who, is being protected. We can better grasp what ‘correcting’ is taking place, and whose interest this serves?

The language of law exists, of course, not only in such written agreements, obligations and rules, but in the language and documentation that uses them, implements and challenges them, which can go all on to comprise case law. And it also exists in the language about the laws, for example by politicians and in media reports about legal cases. We do not have the space here to look at an extended example of case law for the WTO agreements and its representation in wider texts, but we can look at the language the organization uses itself to present them.

On its own website, the WTO suggests the process brought about by members following these rules:

leads to a more prosperous, peaceful and accountable economic world’ and ‘breaks down other barriers between peoples and trading economies.¹

Such language, as when such agreements are spoken of by politicians or in international trade talks, become part of what laws mean. In this case the WTO agreements are accounted for using the word ‘prosperous’, which connotes something positive, where things are looking up. But in reality, as critics might argue, such prosperity, or wealth, will increasingly find its ways into the hands of those who have the most power to control the market. And while the WTO chooses the word ‘peoples’ here, suggesting something positive or ‘every-person’, this is not quite the case. In practice, it will exclude the small scale rural laborers who have no choice but to adapt to these new global rules and the priorities of the supermarkets serving goods to the tables of the wealthy who live half-way around the world. Yet, such laws, framed by how they are presented within specific discourse, become naturalized and embedded within wider patterns of social, economic and political life.

Other language choices are also important here. That the WTO ‘breaks down barriers’ between people is presented as a good thing, connoting a kind of unifying of humanity. But in practice, ‘barriers’ can mean economic protection, stability and self-determination.

What this very brief look at the language used to formulate and present law shows is that choice of words and grammar shape how a thing, process, event, place, etc. are represented. Such choices can foreground and background parts of a process, aspects of a person’s identity, or features of a place as we have seen in these examples. This selective use of words in language is a natural part of how we communicate in settings, providing our views on things in the world and as we seek to meet our aims, whether this is buying a loaf of bread or persuading someone to buy a used car from us. In this sense we can ask whether or not legal language uses more or less transparent formulations, what kind of representations of situations in the world, of persons, events and places do we find. Are some elements prioritized or even set aside?

Legal language and discourse

In CDS it is taken that language is used in ways that are largely socially determined (Fairclough, 1989). The concept of ‘discourse’, which has its origins in the work of Foucault (1978), is one way of grasping the significance of this idea. Discourses are established models of interpretation of things in the world that are linked to different social practices and contexts. Language provides an important route through which these discourses are formulated and shared.

Discourses are socially accepted knowledge about how things work and what things mean. They are rather like stories or explanations that are considered acceptable or even reasonable at a particular point in time in a given society. Discourses are how we organize knowledge and the social practices associated with them. Fairclough (1989) and Van Dijk (1998) explained discourses as kinds of mental models or prototypes that are used as a basis for speaking and writing about the world, and also to use as we interpret what goes on around us. Discourses bring with it the categories of types of social actors and judgments about them, and accepted knowledge about how things are to be done.

In this sense, as Fairclough (1989) argued, whenever we are using language this is done in a way that is socially determined through prevailing discourses. These discourses exist in the minds of people, but are also written into school books, into news reports and into the laws of practice and forms of organization of social institutions, as we saw in the WTO agreements for agriculture. For Foucault (1980), such discourses shape what seems plausible, sensible and important. What lies outside of the logic of such discourses can appear as deviant or irrational, somehow outside of society.

For Kress (1979), our view of the world, the prototypes we carry in our heads, are shaped by the different discourses we encounter as we emerge from children to adults, in the family, in schools, family doctors, entertainment media, etc. This will differ, to some extent, depending on our social and cultural positioning. But it means that the language choices available to us in those settings will be pre-loaded with meanings that reflect the historical priorities and meanings developed for social action in them (Kress, 1979).

In terms of law, we can ask what kinds of terms are presented as given or taken for granted. Of what kinds of prototypes and discourses are these a part? In the context of the WTO agreements above, the language choices must be placed into the wider spread of the ideology of free market neoliberalism around the planet. In the language of the WTO agreements, it is taken for granted that there is need for a correction of former imbalances that are to be corrected by free trade. Free trade is itself presented unproblematically in relation to peace, prosperity and harmony between people. The point here is that language can carry presuppositions, which are based on value judgments that can go unstated.

Such presuppositions run through law and legal processes. When charges are brought against a person, when lawyers carry out legal analysis or a judge assesses a case, this is based on a number of underlying notions relating to things like ‘responsibility, obligation, causation and the autonomy of the individual’ (Cotterrell, 1984, p. 2). Such assumptions are used as neutral, natural and unquestioned (Cotterrell, 1984; Melinkoff, 1963). Yet, as in the case of the terms found in the WTO agreements above, such notions are by no means natural nor inevitable. They are rooted in a particular discourses and established prototypes. And these may exclude issues and causalities, for example, relating to inequalities in societies that greatly shape how people act, the situations in which they will find themselves. Of course, from the perspective of the legal practitioner, such notions will appear as natural. This is since they are interwoven into the seeming self-sufficiency and comprehensiveness of the law as a system, and through the way that they also appear as common sense as laid out in the prevailing discourses in that society at a particular time.

Scholars looking at environmental law comprise one smaller corner of scholarship where there has been more attention to the law and discourse. These scholars have been interested in how laws shift and are shaped by prevailing discourses about nature and the climate at any time. Here it has been shown how the laws themselves and legal decision-making in regard to protecting the environment are driven, not only by scientific knowledge about natural processes and threats to nature, but by the discourses about these issues held by interested parties at a point in time (Jessup, 2010; Jessup & Rubenstein, 2012), which exist in a struggle for dominance (Bulkeley, 2000).

Jessup and Rubenstein (2012, p. 9) explain these discourses as ‘usually condensed into simple, succinct and agreeable storylines’, which carry a range of typical turns of phrase, formulations, buzzwords and clichés. Such environmental discourses provide ‘rallying points’ (ibid) for specific parties. In each case these competing discourses will shape the realm of possibility as what the very nature of environmental issues are, how the problem is defined, and what might be done and by whom (Dryzek, 2007). For example, as discourses have changed in relation to things like acid rain Hajer (1993), the ozone layer Litfin (1994), and sustainability (Aston & Aydos, 2019). In these cases, these authors show, the very legal focus and decision-making is shaped by the prevailing discursive frames of different times.

Such discourses, Aston and Aydos (2019) show, will represent things like ‘public interest’ and formulate relationships between nature and development in the law in different ways. This means that how the environment should be protected varies in form, where this could be through government administration, public participation or through a kind of economic rationalism, where regulation can be accomplished through processes of marketization. Such research provides an excellent indication of the potential for wider studies into the language of the law and legal processes.

Approaching language in the law as an interlocking system of texts

For discourse analysis, the law as a topic for research can appear as challenging, not only because of the opaque language, but precisely because of its self-sufficient and self-referential nature. While news texts or political speeches, or even social media feeds, appear as more simple cases for analysis of language use, laws seem to always form part of a rational interlocking system. Many of us may assume that interpretation here requires the craft of the lawyer.

What we want to show in this special edition is that, as with doing any form of research found under the broader CDS tradition, legal language quickly appears less daunting where we have a clear research question and when we spend time to familiarize ourselves with the relevant laws. As with the case of environmental law, laws are a fundamental part of the core issues with which CDS has traditionally engaged over time, such as gender, race, migration and other forms of social inequalities. Such laws lay out, in each case, what kinds of identities, issues and situations are to be protected from whom and how. As we have seen, such laws are infused by discourses that shape both what can be said about a particular thing and how it can be said. These discourses, as Jessup and Rubenstein (2012) suggest, provide a set of what can be thought of as feasible ‘storylines’, which are comprised of elements such as kinds of participants, actions, settings, causalities, evaluations, etc. These discourses are infused into the laws but also into other texts in news, political talk, social media networks. The aim, therefore, is to seek out and analyze the language of law and legal processes that are part of the kinds of instances of social inequality and injustice that are of concern to us.

One notable case at the time of writing has been the way that courts were handling what was being called ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’. This provides one useful example of how we can connect issues of injustice commonly covered in CDS to the law, where such laws form interlocking chunks of text.

The issues of hate speech and misinformation had become more salient at the time of writing with the rise of social media, which had given public platforms to a greater range of voices and notably to far-right ideologies. In CDS, there has been an interest in identifying the nature of some of these far-right ideologies through an examination of the discourse carried by their social media (Dobkiewicz, 2017; Ledin & Krzyanowski, 2019).

In Europe, where one of the authors is presently based, the law that deals with these issues involves two articles of European Law in particular. It is of interest to look at the nature of this language and what acts, participants and issues it includes and excludes. What is the discursive script here?

In the first place Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights states:

‘Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers’.

Such rights relate to democratic principles, but also to things like freedom of religious expression, the rights to assembly and association (included in Article 11).

In cases where such freedom of expression is seen to be threatened, through hate speech or disinformation, Article 17 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which has been called the ‘abuse clause’ (de Morree, 2017), can be invoked. This states that a person should not:

‘engage in any activity or perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms of the European Convention on Human Rights’.

In other words, this Article can be invoked where someone seeks to infringe on the rights of others to freely hold and share their own views, for example on the basis of politics or religion or where disinformation threatens rights and freedoms associated with the democratic process.

Here under Article 17 it could be argued that the dissemination of racist literature presents an attack on the freedom of others. Where a court accepted such a view, this would relate to the notion of the ‘duties and responsibilities’ that come with freedom and expression (Keane, 2007, p. 645). The defense, however, might evoke Article 10 and claim that such literature comprised the views of a legal political party.

Article 17 has been used against claims denying the Holocaust as a historical fact. Yet, as a number of analysts have shown, the application of these Articles can quickly become more complex and much less clear, once there appears to be less consensus about a particular matter (Keane, 2007). This means that its interpretation has been rather uneven and arbitrary (de Morree, 2017). Looking in detail at the uses of Article 17, Cannie and Voorhoof (2011) argue that there is clearly huge discretion involved in what constitutes the nature of democracy and what constitutes a legitimate threat against it. They note strikingly that the first use of Article 17 was the banning of the Communist Party in 1959 in the Federal Republic of Germany, accepted by the Court as a threat to the democratic order. The point here is that while the wording of laws may remain unchanged, the meaning of them, their interpretation and application, will depend on the prevailing discourses of any context and time.

The challenge for CDS here might be, as in the case of environmental law, to investigate how notions such as hate, democracy and misinformation are treated in applications of these laws. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that some of the greatest threats to democratic principles and individual freedoms in our contemporary world come through the actions and systems created by bodies such as the WTO. What is clear is that what is represented as hate speech in both legislation and more broadly in society tends to be shifting, is always ideological, tends to be used strategically, and is often used in ways that are highly decontextualized (Bouvier, 2020; Matamoros-Fernández & Farkas, 2021; Siapera & Viejo-Otero, 2021).

Cannie and Voorhoof (2011) argue that Article 17 tends to operate at a level focused on some former fear of totalitarian regimes, which reflects the prevalent discourses at the time of its creation, and is less in touch with present everyday society. For one thing, it is out of step with technology in the social media environment, notes Banks (2010), where civic space has fragmented into more discrete networks of connectivity (Bouvier, 2020). Here, managing misinformation takes on a whole different order and is of concern for many kinds of public officials. For example, it is known that most people now get their information about illness through social media influencers who have no formal training and tend to provide, at best, content that is inaccurate (Farsi, 2021; Huo & Turner, 2019). As Assimakopoulos et al. (2017) note, the European Union itself is struggling to produce new definitions of hate speech.

From the perspective of CDS, what is of interest here is not so much that these laws protecting freedom and democracy are outmoded in relation to the nature of the current communications landscape. These laws came about as realizations of discourses, of stories about the world, with their associated elements (actors, ideas, values, etc.) that belong to a socio-historic configuration. And, in this discourse, threats to freedom and democracy came in the form of clearly defined forms of political ideologies such as Nazi fascism and Soviet communism. It was not related to fragmentation of civic society, nor by the dangers posed by global corporations.

Certainly, when we look at these laws, their application in case law, and how they are handled in hearings, hate and misinformation are always formulated through very specific discourses, found also across political communication, news and even in academic research itself. Perhaps most interesting is that ‘hate’ itself becomes a bad thing across these discourses. One might imagine that expressing one’s hate of a system of global trade regulation, which clearly removes freedom and brings in forms of oppression and injustice, should be a good thing. Our point here being that what becomes handled as ‘hate’ and ‘misinformation’, as with any other notion in language, is never neutral.

Conclusion

The aim of this special edition is, in the first place, to help foster more work that bridges legal research and CDS. We hope to show how CDS provides a useful way to approach law and legal processes in terms of the kinds of power that they carry in individual cases. As Flowerdew and Richardson (2017) put it, CDS is about debunking claims to authority carried by language in texts, through a process of revealing the details buried in language. And this is problem driven, meaning we are asking concrete questions about how a text represents people, process and events in ways that may well be somehow unjust.

Importantly, this special edition seeks to show how we need to examine and explore the law, both in the context of laws and decision-making, as well as in regard to how this relates discursively to how laws are represented in other texts, in political talk, news, popular culture, and public understandings on social media. What discourses run through them? In the sociology of law, it has long been established that laws and legal processes, while presenting themselves as a kind of higher code, cannot be understood outside of their embeddedness in social contexts (Mather, 2013). From the perspective of CDS, this means that we can look at how language lays out particular priorities in legal settings.

The papers in this special edition allow us to start to explore issues laid out in this introduction. Two papers by Jen Neller and Gay Marie Francisco look at the ideologies present in laws themselves. Jen looks at the discourses carried by the UK’s ‘stirring up hatred’ provisions of the Public Order Act of 1986. While this is intended to advance equality, it carries a range of contradictions in relation to the relative immutability of race and religion, which, she shows, carry a risk of serving to essentialize and entrench divisions. Gay analyses the Philippine Republic Act 9710, presented as a local translation of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Analysis of documents and proceedings shows how the Act carries discourses of womanhood shaped by a number of Catholic notions of reproductive health.

Three papers reveal ways that the deployment of law can itself be highly discursive, even shifting away from original intentions. Pawel Popiel looks at legal documents from an anti-trust legal lawsuit against Time Warner, calling into question mergers of megacorporations. Here, the courts make their decision favoring the merger, leaning on a discourse where markets require pure free competition, overlooking that markets dominated by large corporations tend towards increasingly lesser competition. Maria Dolhare and Sol Rojas-Lizana look at how laws in Bolivia created to incorporate indigenous notions of territorial rights nevertheless become deployed by judges which carry more Western legal notions of land control.

David Machin, Le Cheng, and Xiaobin Zhu are interested in how laws are used and known, must always be understood within the prevailing discourses of the moment. They look at the US tactically bringing a case against China for breaking their sanctions against Iran, through its reporting by the BBC.

Two papers show how legal process can be seen as competition, not so much about facts, but between discourses that shape how these are to be interpreted. Huijae Yu looks a legal decision-making processes in a case of sexual violence accusations. She considers the typical discursive strategies taken by representatives of victims and accused, which are based on different kinds of ‘rights’. Chris Smith considers police interviews with rape victims, showing tensions of how victims can make themselves heard in the context of dominant discourses of legitimate gendered behavior held by the police.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Le Cheng

Le Cheng is a Chair Professor of Guanghua Law School and a concurrent professor of School of International Studies at Zhejiang University. He is Executive Vice Dean of Zhejiang University's Academy of International Strategy and Law, and Vice Chairman of Cybersecurity Strategy and Law Committee of China. Additionally, he is Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Legal Discourse and Co-editor of Social Semiotics. Among others, he is the Principal Investigator of the Major Project of National Social Science Foundation (Establishing and Perfecting the Comprehensive System of Cyber Governance). He has published widely in discourse studies, semiotics, law and cyber studies.

David Machin

David Machin is Professor of Linguistics at the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, Shanghai International Studies University. He has published extensively in critical linguistics and multimodality. His books include Doing Visual Analysis (2018) and Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (2020). He is co-editor of the journal Social Semiotics.

Notes

1 https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/inbrief_e/inbr_e.htm (accessed on 3 January 2022)