About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

4 Int'l J. Semiotics L. 3 (1991)

handle is hein.journals/intjsemi4 and id is 1 raw text is: International Journal for the Semiotics of Law IV/ 10 [1991 PRESENTING THE EVIDENCE: CONSTRUCTIONS OF REALITY IN COURT by YON MALEY AND RHONDDA FAHEY Macquarie University, N.S.W., Australia Two analogies or metaphors recur in discussions of trial process and the discourse of the courtroom. One is the metaphor of the trial as combat or battle. The reasons for this are fairly obvious. In an adversary system, lawyers or counsel act as champions for the opposing sides and the champions joust for supremacy before an impartial audience of judge and jury. But if the trial is a battle, it is a battle fought with words and the role of discourse strategies in achieving this supremacy becomes all-important. The rules of battle are essentially verbal; they are the rules of evidence and other exclusionary rules which constrain the semiotics of the situation. They stipulate what must be said, what may be said, and what cannot be said - and of course, by whom and in what order. The essentially discursive nature of trial process has prompted the second metaphor for the criminal trial process, that is, of the trial as a process of story telling. A great deal of current work on court room discourse is based on the influential work of Bennett and Feldman who, in their 1981 work Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom, suggested that the underlying interpretive frame in a criminal trial which the jury applies is that of a story.' Bernard Jackson points out that what is involved is a specially ritualised form of storytelling, ritualised by its rules of exclusion, of which not everyone has specialised knowledge? Jackson's own work takes Bennett and Feldman's original insight further, arguing that the 1 W.L. Bennett & M.S. Feldman, Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom (London: Tavistock Publications, 1981). 2 B.S. Jackson, Towards an interdisciplinary model of legal communi- cation, in Onati Workshop on the Semiotics and Sociology of Law (1990), 151, to be published in Ofati Proceedings.

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most