Janet Giltrow Livres

This collection is about how law makes meaning and how meaning makes law. Through clear methodology and substantial findings, chapters expose the deficits of ‘literal’ meaning and the difficulties in 'ordinary' meaning, in international legal contexts and in more immediate social ones, as well as in courtrooms. Further, chapters in this volume see the challenges to national and international commitments to all speakers sharing a common meaning.

This collection of contributions from both linguists and lawyers brings a pragmatic perspective to the linguistic basis for legal meaning and for finding a norm by which to decide a case. That is, it turns from notions of linguistic meaning as resid

The book applies pragmatic analysis to Supreme Court of Canada decisions on indigenous rights, and to historical record of interactions around first legal contact between European and indigenous peoples. Recognising challenges to study of topics in indigeneity, it takes pragmatic methods to discussion of research ethics. Levinson’s concept of genre is re-activated and adds the social-action version of genre found in new-rhetorical genre theory.