“And Never The Twain Shall Meet”? Literary Language in Dutch and English Supreme Court Judgments

Though the relevance of literature for law has been acknowledged for a long time, this does not apply to literary language: lawyers often view the legal and the literary language as worlds apart. Yet, I want to argue that legal texts are indeed more “literary” than is often thought. This thesis investigates if English Supreme Court judgments are more “literary” than Dutch ones, and whether this applies more to older judgments than to more recent ones. Legal language, literary language and “literariness” are discussed. I selected ten Dutch and nine English Supreme Court judgments, each dealing with an aspect of tort law and dating from the last fifty years, to make up a corpus for analysis. The analysis focuses on stylistic and rhetorical features and makes use of the criteria for the establishment of a “cline of literariness” as proposed by Carter and Nash, with short excursions to their theory on the language of fiction and to speech act theory. The results are discussed and, if...Show moreThough the relevance of literature for law has been acknowledged for a long time, this does not apply to literary language: lawyers often view the legal and the literary language as worlds apart. Yet, I want to argue that legal texts are indeed more “literary” than is often thought. This thesis investigates if English Supreme Court judgments are more “literary” than Dutch ones, and whether this applies more to older judgments than to more recent ones. Legal language, literary language and “literariness” are discussed. I selected ten Dutch and nine English Supreme Court judgments, each dealing with an aspect of tort law and dating from the last fifty years, to make up a corpus for analysis. The analysis focuses on stylistic and rhetorical features and makes use of the criteria for the establishment of a “cline of literariness” as proposed by Carter and Nash, with short excursions to their theory on the language of fiction and to speech act theory. The results are discussed and, if possible, scored in tables. I found that not only are English Supreme Court judgments indeed more “literary” than their Dutch counterparts, there is also a clear difference between the judgments from the twentieth century and the more recent ones, with opposite results. On the one hand, the Dutch judgments tend to become more factual and less literary. On the other hand, the more recent English judgments seem to be gaining in literary qualities.Show less

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“And Never The Twain Shall Meet”? Literary Language in Dutch and English Supreme Court Judgments