“The words are plain and clear…”: on interpersonal positioning in the discourse of judicial interpretation

Over the last twenty years, interpersonality has been profitably investigated in such areas as academic and scientific genres (cf. Barton 1995 on metadiscourse; Hirvela and Belcher 2001 on voice and identity). However, the full potential of the study of interpersonality in legal settings remains to be fully explored: in an attempt to contribute to filling this gap, this chapter focuses on the issue of interpersonal positioning (Ivanič and Camps 2001) in a key-genre of legal discourse, i.e. judgments. Accordingly, the research analyses the discourse of judges as they construct their profile as adjudicating professionals in terms of their relative authoritativeness or tentativeness, and in terms of the relationship with their intended readers. In particular, the analysis will concentrate on the strategies chosen by judges when the controversy centres on the disputed interpretation of a term, phrase or passage of relevant legislation. This is a crucial moment of judicial decision-making, especially when the issues at stake are of paramount importance from a broader political or economic point of view: in the EU context, that seems the case of agriculture, a highly controversial subject-matter in which European institutions and Member States have been confronting each other for a few decades now. On the basis of two synchronic corpora of recent judgments by the Court of Justice of the European Union and the Supreme Court of Ireland on agricultural policies, the study combines a text and corpus-based (Gabrielatos et al. 2012; Scott 2008) analysis for the purpose of a qualitative and quantitative comparative study of the tools through which the discourse of EU and Irish judges tackles the issue of controversial passages of legislation. The investigation begins with the manual study of a sample of corpus texts identified as resting primarily on the interpretive problems mentioned above, and it then extends the examination to the full corpus by way of a computer-assisted analysis of terns such as word, phrase, sentence, reading, interpretation, and meaning. Findings provide valuable insights on the judges’ effort to seek a reasonable compromise between strictly professional parameters of legal interpretation – i.e. when the definition of a disputed term is contextualised within a broad outline of general judicial principles - and the civic duty to make the lay reader too apprehend the meanings highlighted by the judge as precisely as possible (Gowers 1962).