Legal and general: towards a genre analysis of

newspaper law reports

Richard Badger*
Centre for English Language Teaching (C.E.L.T), Institute of Education, University of Stirling,
Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland, UK
Abstract
Law reports are key texts for law students and so should be key materials for teachers of
English for Academic Legal Purposes (EALP). However, there are problems with the use of
law reports in the EALP classroom. Firstly, ocial law reports, as opposed to those that
appear in newspapers, have a relatively restricted distribution. Secondly and more impor-
tantly, they are long, complex texts unfamiliar to most language teachers, and so the ways in
which they should be used in the EALP classroom are not always obvious. One source of
clarication is descriptions of law reports. However, most descriptions of the genre have been
limited to ocial law reports, and these descriptions have only covered textual aspects of law
reports. As a result, they have tended to overlook the impact of social and cultural elements in
the way law reports are used by the legal discourse community. The current study addresses
these issues in two ways. Firstly, it focuses on the more widely available newspaper law
reports and, secondly, it oers a description which draws on Martins English Text (1992)
context of culture in order to identify important social and cultural factors and understand
how they might be linked to textual factors. More specically, as the main purpose for which
law students read law reports is to identify the ratio decidendi, the study indicates how the
lexico-grammar and text structure of newspaper law reports may guide the identication of
the ratio decidendi.
# 2003 The American University. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Law reports are key texts in common law systems and for this reason the ability to
read law reports is central to much common law education. It is, therefore, not
surprising that those who teach courses in English for Academic Legal Purposes
English for Specific Purposes 22 (2003) 249263
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E-mail address: r.g.badger@stir.ac.uk (R. Badger).
(EALP) or design materials for such courses (e.g. Riley, 1991; Russell & Locke,
1992) have often made use of law reports. There are, however, two major problems
with the use of law reports in the EALP classroom: accessibility and use.
Law reports are inaccessible, rstly, for reasons of linguistic complexity (see
Bowles, 1995; Davies, 1987) and reasons of length. For instance, a well known case,
Donoghue v. Stevenson [1932] A.C. 562, is over 30 pages long. Secondly, ocial law
reports are usually only available through law libraries, and even where the EALP
practitioner has access to such a library, selecting an appropriate text is a task for
which they may feel they do not have the appropriate skills. However, one kind of
law report, that published in newspapers, has the advantage of being more readily
available in print through such papers as the London Times or on the internet. In
addition, newspaper law reports, while capable of serving the same function within
the legal system as ocial law reports, are written for a more general audience
(Bowles, 1995: p. 202), which means that in terms of length, for example, they are
easier to read. In addition, the cases which are reported have been pre-selected to be
of general interest (Bowles, 1995: p. 203).
Secondly, the ways that law reports are used by the law discourse community have
important implications for how such reports will be used in the EALP classroom.
Few EALP teachers, however, are members of the law discourse community, and it
is quite hard to obtain information from that community about legal issues (see, for
example, Howe, 1993: p. 148).
One alternative source of information might be thought to be descriptions of law
reports by text linguists. This paper describes an attempt to produce such a
description within the framework of genre analysis research, in the hope that it may
inform practice in the EALP classroom.
The paper has four sections. The rst section discusses law reports and the
diculties that may face students who have to read law reports and teachers
who have to prepare their students to read such texts. The second section exam-
ines some descriptions of law reports. The third section draws on my own
research to oer a description which takes into account both textual and social/
cultural factors and relates the two groups of factors. The nal section attempts
to draw some conclusions for text linguists and teachers of English for Specic
Purposes.
2. Law reports
The discipline of law varies from country to country. The most obvious variation
is the major philosophical dierences between the civil law system of a country, such
as France, and the common law system of, for example, England and Wales. One of
the key features of the common law system is that major source of law is precedents
set by previously decided cases, i.e. the doctrine of binding precedent. Harris (1988:
p. 182) describes the doctrine as one of the oldest and most fundamental features of
the English legal system.
250 R. Badger / English for Specic Purposes 22 (2003) 249263
The concept of precedent has been widely analysed. (See, e.g. Harris, 1988: p. 182
et seq.) Williams oers the following explanation:
What the doctrine of precedent declares is that cases must be decided the same
way when their material facts are the same. Obviously, it does not require that
all the facts should be the same. We know that in the ux of life all the facts of a
case will never recur; but the legally material facts may recur and it is with these
that the doctrine is concerned. (1982: p. 67)
More technically, judges giving the decision in a particular case must have a rea-
son or legal principle on which they base that decision, and this reason, the ratio
decidendi, is binding on later judges hearing cases with similar facts in courts lower
down the hierarchy.
Most common law systems have a range of ways of reporting the decisions in
cases. So, in England and Wales, there are ocial reports, such as the All England
Reports and Appeal Cases, and unocial reports, which often appear in newspapers,
such as The Guardian and The Times. Ocial law reports have the highest status
within the Anglo-Welsh legal system. However, reports from newspapers, particu-
larly from The Times, are often cited in courts in England and Wales. While they are
of lower status, they are important legal documents and, sometimes, cover cases
which have not appeared in ocial records.
In England and Wales, unocial reports are normally produced by court repor-
ters and generally include the court reporters version of the judgement produced by
the judge or judges. In contrast, in the USA, where the legal system is also based on
common law principles, unocial reports include a summary of the case written by
a writer on behalf of a publisher, but the body of the text is given as written by the
judge. The present paper deals with law reports written in England and Wales and
regarded as appropriate for EALP courses.
3. Reading law reports
In England and Wales, law is widely studied at undergraduate level. This diers
from the situation in the USA, where legal studies can only be undertaken at post-
graduate level. Perhaps for this reason, students studying law in England and Wales
are widely reported to have diculties in reading law reports (Bowles, 1995; Davies,
1987; Williams, 1982). Many of these diculties are similar to those faced by readers
of other legal texts, in that law reports have unusual vocabulary and complex syn-
tax. However, as Davies (1987: p. 410) comments, law reports are polyphonic and
the tune that people with legal training derive from such texts will be dierent
from the tune which lay readers extract. In particular, experts normally read law
reports with a particular function in mind, the identication of the ratio decidendi.
Therefore, it is not surprising that, as Williams (1982: p. 67) notes, learning how to
nd the ratio decidendi of a case is an important part of the training of a lawyer.
R. Badger / English for Specic Purposes 22 (2003) 249263 251
The diculties of identifying the ratio decidendi can be illustrated with the case of
Shah v Shah and Others (reported in The Times, 15 May 2001, and available at
http://www.thetimes.co.uk).
In this case, the defendant had signed a document agreeing to pay the plainti
$1.5 million. Such a document should be signed by a witness in the presence of the
previous signatories. However, in this case the witness had signed the document
after the defendant had left the room. The defendant claimed that this meant the
document had no legal eect. The Court of Appeal decided that the defendant could
not put forward this argument and said a signatory who had initially presented a
document as valid was not allowed to claim that the document was not valid
because the witness had not signed at the appropriate time.
Novice law students might be tempted to read this as an application of simple
fairness and, in some discourses, this would be an appropriate interpretation. For
experienced lawyers, however, the reason for the decision, the ratio decidendi, is more
likely to be seen as being an application of the doctrine of estoppel, that is, that once
you have presented a state of aairs as being true to someone else, you cannot escape
your responsibilities to that person by revealing that the state of aairs was not in fact
true. Using Davies (1987: p.416) terms, law students need to move from the surface
tune of law reports to an understanding of the more signicant, and functional,
melody.
4. Descriptions of law reports
This section examines three previous descriptions of ocial law reports by Bhatia
(1993: pp. 1356), Maley (1985: p. 44), and Bowles (1995: pp. 201222). These
descriptions focus on features within the text and are largely concerned with the text
structure of law reports.
5. Previous descriptions
Bhatia identies moves in the text structure of law reports as shown in Table 1.
Maleys description does not distinguish main and subordinate stages, and he
omits Bhatias identifying the case and replaces judgment with order/nding, but
Table 1
Bhatias description of the structure of law reports
Main stages Subordinate stages
1. Identifying the case
2. Establishing the facts of the case
3. Arguing the case
3.1 History of the case
3.2 Argument
3.3 Ratio Decidendi (or reason for the decision)
4. Judgment
252 R. Badger / English for Specic Purposes 22 (2003) 249263
is otherwise very similar. However, Maley does dier from Bhatia in that his gloss
on the facts includes the relevant history of the case. This is, presumably, in
recognition of the inclusion of the relevant history in appeal cases. (Table 2)
Bowles (1995: p. 203) description of the structure of All England Law Reports is
very similar to Bhatia and Maley, though, unlike Maley, he does not refer to the
history of the case (Table 3)
There are dierences in terminology. Bhatia uses the term judgment to refer to
the decisions regarding the relative rights of the parties to the case, while Maley uses
order/nding and Bowles uses the term decision for this. Also, and rather con-
fusingly, Bowles judgment covers Bhatias argument and ratio decidendi and
Maleys reasoning and conclusion.
All three descriptions omit the summary of the case, which is normally known,
though not labeled, as the headnote. The headnote is a summary of the case,
including the decision, which is written by the law reporter. It appears at or near the
beginning of a law report. Because the headnote is written entirely by the law
reporter, it is not strictly a part of the law report and lacks the authority of those
sections of report written by the judge or judges; this may explain the omission of the
summary. However, the headnote is the rst piece of continuous text in a law report,
and it would be an unusual reader who did not make use of the headnote as a summary.
The analyses we have discussed so far cover ocial law reports. Of the three stud-
ies discussed above, only Bowles covers newspaper law reports. In a study based on a
corpus of six law reports, Bowles (1995: p. 203) identies a less delicate structure for
Table 2
Maleys description of the structure of law reports
Stages Description
1. Facts An account of events and/or the relevant history of the case
2. Issues The issue of either fact or law or both
3. Reasoning
4. Conclusion The principle or rule declared applicable for the instance case
5. Order/nding
Table 3
Bowles description of the structure of law reports
Main stages Subsidiary stages
1. Heading
2. Description of court
3. Keywords
4. Description (of the facts)
4. 1. List of cases cited
4. 2. Opinion of concurring judges
5. Judgment (argument of judge and principle of law)
5. 1. Opinions of concurring judges
6. Decision (of court)
R. Badger / English for Specic Purposes 22 (2003) 249263 253
newspaper law reports. There are three moves: the summary, the decision and the
judgment. The inclusion of the summary in part reects the fact that newspapers do
not distinguish the headnote from the main body of the report as clearly as ocial
law reports, and it may be that what Bowles calls the decision might be better trea-
ted as a part of the summary. However, this also reects the fact that newspaper law
reports often do not repeat the decision at the end of the law report (Table 4)
Bowles also identies some dierences between the reports in The Independent and
The Times, though the summary, decision, judgment sequence is common to both
papers. Interestingly, he accounts for the dierence in structure between the two sets
of newspaper law reports on the basis of a social/cultural factor: the dierence in the
readership of The Independent and The Times.
6. The present study
The present study was based on an examination of law reports which appeared in
two British papers, The Guardian and The Times. The Guardian and The Times are
both daily newspapers and are available widely in the UK. Both papers have a lar-
gely professional/educated readership, with The Guardian regarded as politically
more left wing and less establishment oriented than The Times. The inclusion of law
reports in The Guardian is a recent innovation, while The Times has included law
reports for over thirty years.
The corpus for the study consisted of 25 law reports totaling over 30,000 words in
all. While this is a relatively small corpus compared to some studies, it compares well
with other investigations into law reports. For example, Maley (1985) and Bhatia
(1993) are based on one report, and Bowles (1995) is based on six.
Further details of the corpus are given in the Appendix to this paper. It is not pos-
sible to say to what extent the sample is typical of newspaper law reports, but there was
no reason at the time of selection to believe that the sample is in any way biased. The
question of how representative the corpus may be is addressed in more detail below.
Table 4
Bowles description of the structure of newspaper law reports
The Times The Independent
1. Summary 1. Summary
2. Decision
(description of facts)
(description of law)
2. Decision
(description of facts)
(description of plainti/defendant arguments)
3. Judgment
(description of facts)
(description of plainti/defendant arguments
3. Judgment
254 R. Badger / English for Specic Purposes 22 (2003) 249263
Initially, the present study was designed to produce a description of the stages of a
newspaper law report based on this corpus. The resulting description appears in
Table 5.
Elements in brackets do not appear in all reports. Elements are listed in the order
in which they appear; so, for example, lawyers appears twice in the table because
this element may appear in two dierent places but only appears once in any one
report.
The frequency with which the elements appeared is given in Table 6. The descrip-
tion is more detailed than that in Bowles (1995) but is otherwise very similar. I have,
though, treated the decision as part of the summary both because this seems to
reect the natural way of reading the report and also because in my corpus several
reports included the decision at the end of the report as well as in the summary (see
stage 11 in Table 5). The similarity between the two descriptions of newspaper law
Table 5
A description of the structure of newspaper law reports
Stage Description of stage
1. Headline
2. Court The name of the court hearing the case
3. Title of Case
4. (Judges) The names of the judges hearing the case
5. (Date) The date of the case (rather than the report)
6. Summary Normally includes facts, ratio and decision
7. Lawyers The names of the lawyers involved in the case
8. (Facts)
9. (Facts and Decision)
10. (Legislation)
11. (Decision)
12. (Lawyers) The names of the lawyers involved in the case
Table 6
Frequency of elements in the corpus
The Guardian (9 reports) The Times (13 reports) Total (25 reports)
Headline 9 16 25
Court 9 16 25
Title of Case 9 16 25
Judges 9 13 22
Date 9 13 22
Summary 9 16 25
Lawyers 0 9 9
Facts 9 0 9
Facts and Decision 0 16 16
Legislation 1 0 1
Decision 9 0 9
Lawyers 9 13 22
R. Badger / English for Specic Purposes 22 (2003) 249263 255
reports supports the claim that I made earlier that the corpus for most purposes
represents a fair sample of newspaper law reports (Table 6)
There are some variations within my corpus. For example, The Times species
both the barristers and the solicitors, while The Guardian only identies the solici-
tors. More importantly, The Guardian uses headings such as facts and decision to
label sections. The Times does not make use of such devices and also combines the
facts and decision sections. This may reect the relative novelty of law reports in
TheGuardian and the consequent fact that The Guardians readership is less familiar
with law reports.
A second kind of variation relates to the eld of law. Two of The Times reports, In
re T and In re B, concerned the welfare of minors. This aected the way in which
these cases were reported in several ways. Firstly, there is eectively only one party
to the case, and so the titles of these law reports are in the form In re+a letter
identifying the minor, rather than A v B or A v B ex parte C. Secondly, the date of
these welfare cases is not given, and the judges names appear within another stage
in the text rather than in a separate element. Thirdly, the names of the lawyers
involved are not given. This suggests, again, that in order to understand how law
reports are constructed, it is not enough to look at the texts; we also need to take
into account social/cultural factors, such as the eld of law in which the case occurs.
This also has implications for the degree to which the corpus is a representative
sample of newspaper law reports. It may be that a future corpus would need to
consider how to ensure that text selection reected the relative importance of dif-
ferent areas of law. However, for the purposes of the present study, and given the
size of the present corpus compared to those used in other studies, it seems unlikely
that the presence of two law reports which deal with the rights of minors has made
the corpus unrepresentative.
If we compare Bhatias (see Table 1), Maleys (see Table 2), Bowles (see Table 3)
descriptions of ocial law reports and my own analyses of newspaper law reports
(see Table 5), there clearly are dierences. However, these are relatively minor and
are mainly to do with variations in the delicacy and optionality of the descriptions.
In broad terms, the descriptions are the same. The similarity between the
descriptions of ocial law reports and newspaper law reports supports the idea that
these are best seen not as two kinds of text, but rather as sub-categories of the same
genre.
This kind of research nding has value for the EALP teacher, and Badger (1999)
and Bowles (1995: p. 221) oer some helpful ways in which this kind of description
can be exploited in the classroom. It would seem to be useful to law students to
know, for example, where the decision normally appears.
However, the descriptions fail to capture what it is that makes a law report a
distinctive genre. For example, the fact that the name of the court comes before the
facts of the case does not seem to cast much light on how one should read a law
report. In addition, the descriptions seem to imply that the way law reports are
organized is arbitrary. Such a view of law reports might lead to classroom practice
which treats law reports rather like Mount Everest: being read because they are
there.
256 R. Badger / English for Specic Purposes 22 (2003) 249263
A more useful approach would seem to be to try to understand how the non-tex-
tual situation and the text structure of law reports are interrelated, and so the next
part of the study is devoted to the development of a description of law reports which
takes into account such non-textual or social/cultural factors.
7. Social/cultural descriptions
Various frameworks have linked language use to what Martin (1992) calls the
context of culture. In what follows I have adopted a framework derived from genre
analysis since, as Devitt (1993: p. 579) says, Genre and situation are so linked as to
be inseparable, but it is genre that determines situation as well as situation that
determines genre.
The most important way in which texts are embedded in the situation is that they
carry out some communicative purpose. So, Swales (1990: p. 58) denes a genre as
a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of com-
municative purposes. Similarly, Bhatia (1993: p. 13) says a genre is a recogniz-
able communicative event characterized by a set of communicative purpose(s),
while for Martin (1992: p. 505) genre is a goal-oriented social process.
These three interpretations of genre suggest that the key concept is that of pur-
pose, function or goal. A genre, we might say, is a purposive language event. As
discussed earlier, when students of law read law reports, their communicative pur-
pose is to identify the legal principles or ratio decidendi, and so in what follows we
will be examining how this purpose might be reected in a description of a law
report.
In particular, if the main purpose of the genre of law reports is to act as a source
of legal principles, it would seem to follow that a genre analysis should help iden-
tify the ratio decidendi. However, identifying the ratio is not a mechanical pro-
cess (Williams, 1982: p. 67), and it is unlikely that an aspect of genre will map on
to a particular textual or lexico-grammatical feature. We are looking for a prob-
abilistic kind of relationship between the ratio and textual or lexico-grammatical
features.
In terms of text structure, the ratio decidendi tends to appear in two places in the
law report: the headnote, or summary, and the decision section. While this claim
Table 7
Lexico-grammatical signals of generality and specicity
Signals of generality Change to present tense Indenite repeat nominals
Particular phrases: it was a universal practice,
it was best practice, the accused, in circumstances such as the present
Signals of specicity Change to past perfect Personal names etc.
Particular phrases: instant case; the judgment of the court; the present case
R. Badger / English for Specic Purposes 22 (2003) 249263 257
does not appear in other studies, it is likely that many teachers of EALP make use of
this relationship, though not necessarily in direct or explicit ways.
In terms of the lexico-grammar, the relationship is less direct. Statements of the
law in general and of the ratio decidendi in particular tend to be expressed as
generalisations, so that a search for the ratio of a particular case might be guided by
the resources which the lexico-grammar of English makes available to distinguish
between general and specic statements (see, e.g., Master, 1987). The present study
has identied a range of lexical and grammatical signals of the level of generality.
These are summarised in Table 7.
These signals often co-occur, and it is quite dicult to determine which signal, if
any, takes precedence. It is also important to emphasise that these are primarily
signals of the level of generality and that not all generalisations are statements of law
and, further, that not all statements of law are rationes decidendi. The link between
the internal lexico-grammar and the ratio is not direct. However, it is useful to know
that the most important part of a law report is to be found in general rather than
specic statements.
7.1. Signals of generality
The most common signal of generality in the corpus is a change between past and
present tense. For example, we often nd a principle of law followed by an instance
of its application.
In the examples which follow, the signals are in italics.
It is in the public interest that police ocers should feel free to communicate
fully, frankly and in condence with the Director of Public Prosecutions with-
out fear that such communications might subsequently be disclosed in civil
proceedings or used for purposes other than the enforcement of criminal law.
Mr. Justice Wood therefore refused to order disclosure of a report from the
Chief Constable of Surrey to the DPP relating to a murder investigation, for the
purposes of a civil action against the Chief Constable. (Evans v Chief Constable
of Surrey)
Other instances of where the present tense signals generality include:
It is not the jurys function to evaluate competing causes or to choose which is
dominant, provided that they are satised that the accuseds acts can fairly be
said to have made a signicant contribution to the victims death. (Regina v
Cheshire)
The normal practice is that, as a precondition for granting an interlocutory
injunction against a defendant, the plainti is required to undertake that, if he
is unsuccessful at the trial of the main action, he will compensate the defendant
for any loss suered as a result of the injunctiona cross-undertaking in
damages. (Kirklees Borough Council v Wickes Building Supplies)
258 R. Badger / English for Specic Purposes 22 (2003) 249263
If a person arrived in Britain with the intention of embarking on a course of
study as his sole or main purpose, but deliberately concealing that intention, he
was an illegal entrant. That person comes fairly within the category of a person
who is in breach of the immigration rules. (Regina v Home Secretary ex parte
Adesina)
The second most common signal of generality in the corpus is the use of an
indenite determiner in a nominal group whose head has appeared earlier in the
text. Therefore, an industrial tribunal below signals that the second sentence is
general.
The tribunal were wrong in having taken into account the experts oral evidence.
It was important to note that the rules introduced to give eect to the equal
value provisions of the Equal Pay Act 1970 only formed part of the general
structure of procedures before an industrial tribunal. (Aldridge v British Tele-
communications plc)
Other examples include:
The plainti appealed against the award of $50. . .the objective of an award for
unlawful racial discrimination was restitution. (Alexander v Home Oce)
It could be validly executed only if it was signed by an individual in the presence
of a witness who attested the signature. . .Failure to comply with the additional
formality of attestation should not permit a person to escape the consequences
of an apparently valid deed he had signed, representing that he had done so in
the presence of an attesting witness, merely by claiming that in fact such witness
was not present at the time of signature. (Shah v Shah)
It was a species of prospective evidence which might throw light on the com-
plainants state of mind. . .Accordingly, a prior relationship between a complai-
nant and an accused might sometimes be relevant to what decision was made on
a particular occasion. (Regina v A)
it required the jury to consider the information actually in the possession of a
defendant. . .There was no warrant for attaching to the word reasonable, via
the words particular circumstances, the standards or characteristics of a
defendant himself. (Regina v Colohan)
A less common, though still important, signal is the use of groups of words asso-
ciated with generality. For example, we have it was a universal practice in
Wickes and B & Q appealed on the grounds that the injunction should not have
been granted without requiring the councils to give cross-undertakings in
damages. Lord Justice Dillon said thatit was a universal practice, as between
R. Badger / English for Specic Purposes 22 (2003) 249263 259
subjects, to require the cross-undertaking however overwhelming the plaintis
case might appear to be, since it was not the courts function when hearing an
interlocutory application to anticipate the outcome of the trial (1920 from
Kirklees B.C. v Wickes Building Supplies)
We also have the related
It would be contrary to public policy to allow the relitigation of decided questions
of fact in circumstances such as the present and the later judge should not attempt to
go behind facts previously found. [In re B (minor)]
Another signal of generality, and so possibly of the ratio decidendi, is the use of
conditional sentences, as in:
If a reporting accountant negligently prepared a report intended to assist the
Law Society in deciding whether and when to exercise its powers of intervention
in order, among other things, to protect the compensation fund, the reporting
accountant should be held responsible for loss to the fund caused by that neg-
ligence. (Law Society v KPMG Peat Marwick and Others)
7.2. Signals of specicity
A change to specicity is often signalled by a change to the past perfect, as in:
Such a condition is a rare but not unknown complication of intubation of the
windpipe. Mr Jereys windpipe had so narrowed that even a small amount of
mucous could cause asphyxiation. (Regina v Cheshire)
The use of a personal name often signals specicity. Thus, in the passage below we
have a general principle of law followed by a statement relating to a specic situation:
It is the duty of national courts to ensure the legal protection which persons
derive from the direct eect of community law. If there is no cross-undertaking
and the right to trade on Sunday is established at the trial, Wickes and B & Q will
have been adversely aected by having been restrained by the injunctions pend-
ing the trial, without compensation. (Kirklees BC v Wickes Building Supplies)
Specicity is signalled in a range of groups and phrases. For example, we nd in
the present case in the following passage:
Any document which it was reasonable to suppose contained information
which might enable the party applying for discovery either to advance his own
case or to damage that of his adversary must be disclosed. The rst thing to
note in the present case was that the onus at the trial would be upon the defen-
dant to prove on a balance of probabilities that the arresting ocers had rea-
sonable cause to suspect, and unless that burden was discharged the plainti
could succeed. (Evans v Chief Constable of Surrey)
260 R. Badger / English for Specic Purposes 22 (2003) 249263
8. Conclusion
This paper has argued for descriptions of text which take into account textual and
social/cultural factors as well as the relationship between both sets of factor. This
argument has implications for both text linguists and teachers of English for Specic
Purposes, with specic reference to newspaper law reports and other text types as well.
9. Text linguists
The present paper provides a description of law reports which takes into account
one aspect of the context, the social purpose. While this description may be regarded
as a useful development in our understanding of newspaper and, probably, other
kinds of law reports, it is not complete. Firstly, the ways in which communicative
purpose is linked to the lexico-grammar have only been partially explored, and sec-
ondly the ways in which other aspects of the context inuence the way law reports are
formed have not been examined. It would seemto me, for example, that a description of
a law report for a practising lawyer would be, to some extent, dierent from a descrip-
tion for an academic lawyer or a student lawyer because the communicative purposes
for which the text is being used would be dierent. A lawyer would be reading a law
report to support an argument in court or advice to a client, while a student would be
reading the same text as a source for an assignment or examination answer. One of the
tasks of the text linguist is to explain how the same text can be so polyphonic.
More generally, descriptions need to take account of social/cultural factors related
to Hallidays (1978) tenor, eld, and mode as well as Martins (1992) communicative
purpose. Under the head of tenor, for example, text linguists need to investigate how
specic discourse communities use particular genres or produce descriptions of texts
in co-operation with members of the relevant discourse communities. It may be no
accident that the most successful genre analyses have been of academic genres,
where the genre analysts are either members of the relevant discourse community or
have considerable insight into the norms of that community (e.g. Swales, 1990).
Similarly, this research has found signs that aspects of the tenor, here the readership
of dierent newspapers, and eld, including here the area of law, have an impact on
the form of a given newspaper law report.
10. Teachers of EA(L)P
Linguistic descriptions are an important source of information for language
learning. However, there are dangers in letting such descriptions overwhelm the
important insights that come from investigations into learning. The present study
has not attempted to examine how people learn to deal with law reports, but there
are some implications for classroom practice. In particular, the present study sug-
gests that teachers of EALP need to make their students aware of the commu-
nicative purpose for which they might read law reports and how achieving this
R. Badger / English for Specic Purposes 22 (2003) 249263 261
purpose can be aided by an understanding of some features of the text structure and
lexico-grammar of law reports.
At a more general level, perhaps the most important conclusion that can be drawn
for this paper is that a knowledge of lexico-grammar and genre structure of parti-
cular sets of texts should not be separated from the discourse community that gives
rise to those texts. This implies that ESP teaching needs to take into account both
internal factors, that is, textual and lexico-grammatical factors, and social/cultural
factors, that is, matters relating to the eld, tenor, mode and purpose, as well as how
these two groups of factors relate.
There are, at least, three ways in which language teaching might approach this.
One way is through team teaching (see Dudley-Evans, 2001; Johns & Dudley-Evans,
1985) where expertise about language learning can be combined with expertise about
how particular genres are used. Secondly, ESP teachers may need to develop their
skills in carrying out research into target discourse communities (however, see
Howe, 1993 for some resistance to this from law educators). Thirdly, ESP teachers
may wish to draw on the knowledge and research expertise of those whom they
teach and come to see helping students to investigate their own target communities
as a central part of ESP programmes.
Appendix. Law Reports in Corpus
1. Akewushola v Secretary of State for the Home Department The Times 11/11/99.
2. Al-Kandari v J. R. Brown & Co The Guardian 1/3/88.
3. Aldridge v British Telecommunications plc The Times 6/10/89.
4. Alexander v Home Oce The Guardian 17/2/88.
5. Benham v Poole Borough Council The Guardian 23/10/91.
6. Briggs v Baptiste and Others. The Times. 3/11/99.
7. Cleveland Museum of Art v Capricorn International SA The Times 21/10/89.
8. Evans v Chief Constable of Surrey The Guardian 20/1/88.
9. Hendriks v Secretary of State for the Environment The Times 6/10/89.
10. In re B (minor) The Times 5/10/89.
11. In re T (minor) The Times 4/10/89.
12. Kirklees Borough Council v Wickes Building Supplies The Guardian 1/5/91.
13. Law Society v KPMG Peat Marwick and Others. The Times 11/11/99.
14. Regina v ColohanThe Times 14/6/ 01.
15. Regina v Jelen, Regina v Katz The Times 5/10/89.
16. Regina v Board of Visitors of HM Prison, the Maze ex Parte Hone and ex
Parte McCartan The Guardian 22/1/88.
17. Regina v Cheshire The Guardian 30/4/91.
18. Regina v Dearlove The Guardian 29/1/88.
19. Regina v Deputy Governor of Parkhurst Prison, ex parte Leech The Guardian
5/2/88.
20. Regina v Home Secretary ex parte Adesina The Guardian 18/2/88.
262 R. Badger / English for Specic Purposes 22 (2003) 249263
21. Regina v Immigration Appeal Tribunal, ex parte Hussain The Times 9/10/89.
22. Robertson Research International Ltd v ABG Exploration BV and Others.
The Times. 3 November 1999.
23. Secretary of State for Employment v Levy The Times 5/10/89.
24. Shah v Shah and Others The Times 15/5/01. Available at http://www.
thetimes.co.uk
25. Sleeman v Highway Care Ltd. The Times 3/11/99.
Many of the more recent Times law reports can be accessed through their web
pages at: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/ Follow the links for law and then law reports.
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Richard Badger [LLB, PGCE (TESOL), MA, PhD] has worked in Nigeria,
Malaysia and Algeria and currently teaches at the Centre of English Language
Teaching at the University of Stirling. He has published articles on teaching writing,
EAP course design and EALP.
R. Badger / English for Specic Purposes 22 (2003) 249263 263