CFP: IJSL - Special Issue

Call for Papers

Journal Website: http://www.springer.com/law/journal/11196

Guest editors: Mate Paksy, Edina Vinnai

The guest editors for the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law invite scholars to submit to Special Issue: Hungarian Language and Law: Developing a Grammar for Social Inclusion, a Vocabulary for Political Emancipation.

The so-called ‘law and language’ movement has attracted a great deal of attention from academic lawyers in Hungary since a while ago. In their papers, a good number of scholars have been elaborating literature overviews, assessing arguments known from text books or sketching the putative or real influence of this or that popular social scientist. Studies purported to draw out general conclusions from empirically well-founded case studies are rare. In order to fill this important gap now we are providing interdisciplinary scholars with a unique opportunity to publish their findings gained from the analysis

of the Hungarian legal discourse using empirical methodology. We describe ‘empirical’ any sufficiently coherent fact-based research reflecting the language of legal discourse. This methodological feature may be manifested through a paper classified usually as ‘law and language’ or legal semiotics, legal history or comparative law, sociology and anthropology of law. Moreover we are convinced that main challenge today in law and language as a critical social science is to assess empirically cases when vulnerable people are participating in legal discourses; they are the ones who are real shortage of a new grammar attempting at a better social inclusion, and a new vocabulary for a more extended political emancipation.

This special issue invites contributions that address some of the questions listed below with a special focus on ethnic, sexual, religious and other minority members belonging to Hungarian linguistic communities, particularly if they don’t live in the ‘mainland’ Hungary but elsewhere in the world.
In selecting contributors, priority will be given to those who will fulfil the listed methodological requirements. Independent scholars demonstrating proficiency in Hungarian language but not belonging to the mainland Hungarian academic circles are especially encouraged to send proposals.

Submissions on the following topics are particularly welcome:

•   An Early Attempt to Develop a Multicultural Law: Assessing the Statute on Nationalities (1868)

•   Codification as Socio-linguistic Phenomenon in Hungary: Between Paternalism and Libertarianism

•   Lost in Transition because Lost in Translation: Transplanting Vague Western Legal Concepts into Hungarian Public Law

•   Linguistic Representations of Vulnerability: Children, Women, Sexual Minorities, Disabled and Elderly People

•   Social Inclusion through Law and Language: How to Fight against Discrimination if a Member of the Roma Population Involved in Legal Adjudication?

•   Legacies in Competition: Turkish, German, Russian and Anglo-Saxon influences on Hungarian Legal Language (in one specific law-field)

•   Multimodality in Hungarian Law: Transfer between Written and Spoken Media in Legal

            Contexts

Submission instructions
Please email a brief, 600-700 word abstract as attached pdf or doc file to HUNLawLang@uni- miskolc.hu. Abstracts should be suitable for anonymous review. The email’s body must include the author’s name, title of the paper, and contact information. The submission deadline is June 30, 2018. Decisions can be expected by July 31, 2018.