Diversity and Tolerance in Socio-Legal Contexts Explorations in the Semiotics of Law

Why is there so much resistance to recent issues of tolerance and diversity? Despite efforts of the international community to encourage open-mindedness, recent attempts at international, political and economic integration have shown that religious, cultural and ethnic tolerance and diversity remain under threat. The contributions in the volume reflect the growing importance of these issues and why resistance is so widespread. Part I addresses the relationship between the language of law and its power, whilst Part II explores the interplay of tolerance and diversity under visual, legislative and interpretative perspectives. This collection as a whole offers a combination of varied perspectives on the analysis, application and exploitation of laws and will be a valuable source of information for those interested in the general area of language and the law.

Anne Wagner, is an Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics., Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale, France. She is the President of the International Roundtables for the Semiotics of Law and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (Springer). Her main research interests include legal language, law and semiotics, contemporary legal theory, law and literature. She is one of the editors of special issues published in the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law and has also published extensively on these issues in a variety of scholarly venues. Vijay K. Bhatia is a Visiting Professor in the Department of English and Communication at City University of Hong Kong. He has published widely on legal discourse. He is best known for his work Genre Analysis of legal genres. He has worked on several research projects, two of which are Analyzing Genre-bending in Corporate Disclosure Documents, and International Arbitration Practice: A Discourse Analytical Study, in which he leads research teams from about 20 countries, which consist of specialists from law, arbitration, and discourse analysis.