<p>Recent research on legal discourses from a linguistic perspective has gained significant momentum, particularly in the Vietnamese context. A key development in Vietnam is the recognition of "precedent" (Án lệ) as a valid source of law. Despite this progress, there is a notable lack of studies examining the functional language of this discourse. This paper aims to empirically investigate how judges interpret experiences within Vietnamese precedents. The research corpus includes all 17 active criminal precedents in Vietnam, documented across 111 A4 pages, and encompasses various cases such as murder, robbery, property embezzlement, and vehicle-related offenses. Utilizing Halliday's Register Theory (Halliday Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989), this study delineates the creation of a Field in Vietnamese criminal precedents, characterized by three variables: Field, Mode, and Tenor. Building on Martin &amp; Rose’s (Working with Discourse: Meaning Beyond the Clause, Bloomsbury, London, 2007) identification of two systems for realizing Field in discourse—Ideation and Conjunction—this research applies these theoretical frameworks to analyze the linguistic tools judges use to articulate human experiences in Vietnamese criminal precedents. Adopting a qualitative methods approach, the study employs content analysis to explore the meanings established in these precedents, alongside statistical methods to quantify the frequency of Ideational meaning-making resources utilized in constructing the Field. The anticipated outcomes include elucidating the relationships that contribute to the construction of the Field in Vietnamese precedent discourses and summarizing the typical means of Conjunction employed within these legal texts.</p>