Law is something created and conditioned by language and legal discourse; thus, law may be understood as a discursive space. This paper explores the language of law (and the knowledge thereof) as a discursive enclosure of law. Within the discursive space of law, legal proceedings—the trial—may be perceived as a consecrated ritualistic space of a kind designated to resolve disputes: parties bring their disagreements into the said discursive space and it delivers the resolution. There are various dimensions to the enclosure of this space, both physical and discursive. Recently, the digital media landscape has been changing the nature of this space, opening up the otherwise formalized proceedings to a broader informal debate, thus widening the discursive space, pushing the boundaries of judicial performance and consequently contesting the limits of independent judicial decision-making. This paper tackles the issues associated with the discursive boundaries of the performance of a trial and shows that, due to the essentially liminal nature of the trial, contesting the limits of the space of the trial defined by traditionally specialized language diffuses the established discursive limits of law and those of the trial itself, possibly testing the limits of judicial independence and influencing the classic notion of the public nature of a legal trial.

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The Outer Limits of the Judicial Trial

  • Terezie Smejkalová

摘要

Law is something created and conditioned by language and legal discourse; thus, law may be understood as a discursive space. This paper explores the language of law (and the knowledge thereof) as a discursive enclosure of law. Within the discursive space of law, legal proceedings—the trial—may be perceived as a consecrated ritualistic space of a kind designated to resolve disputes: parties bring their disagreements into the said discursive space and it delivers the resolution. There are various dimensions to the enclosure of this space, both physical and discursive. Recently, the digital media landscape has been changing the nature of this space, opening up the otherwise formalized proceedings to a broader informal debate, thus widening the discursive space, pushing the boundaries of judicial performance and consequently contesting the limits of independent judicial decision-making. This paper tackles the issues associated with the discursive boundaries of the performance of a trial and shows that, due to the essentially liminal nature of the trial, contesting the limits of the space of the trial defined by traditionally specialized language diffuses the established discursive limits of law and those of the trial itself, possibly testing the limits of judicial independence and influencing the classic notion of the public nature of a legal trial.