This book provides a range of highly accessible approaches from Discourse Studies for analyzing legal language in legislation, documents, proceedings and media reporting. It is a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of law, language and linguistics, discourse studies, sociology, and media and cultural studies.

Le Cheng is Professor in Guanghua Law School, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. He is Executive Vice Dean of the Academy of International Strategy and Law and Vice Chairman of Cybersecurity Strategy and Law Committee of China. He is Editor of International Journal of Legal Discourse and Co-editor of Social Semiotics. He has published widely in discourse studies and semiotics, in relation to law and cyber governance.

David Machin is Professor in the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, Shanghai International University, China. He works in the area of discourse studies and multimodal analysis. His publications include Doing Visual Analysis (2018); Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (2020); and How to do Critical Discourse Analysis (2023). He is co-editor of the journal Social Semiotics.

Introduction: The Law and Critical Discourse Studies 1. Protecting "Competition, not Competitors": Antitrust Discourse and the AT&T-Time Warner Merger 2. Applying the principles of Vivir Bien to a court resolution in Bolivia: language, discourse, and land law 3. Race, religion, law: An intertextual micro-genealogy of 'stirring up hatred' provisions in England and Wales 4. The Magna Carta of women as the Philippine translation of the CEDAW: A feminist critical discourse analysis 5. The Depoliticization of law in the news: BBC reporting on US use of extraterritorial or 'long-arm' law against China 6. Is this discursive Yentling? A critical study of an RCMP officer's interaction with a child sexual assault complainant 7. 'If she asked for settlement money, she must not be a real victim': An interdisciplinary analysis of the discourse of victims and perpetrators of sexual violence