Patterns of Linguistic Variation in American Legal English: A Corpus-based Study is one of the newest volumes (22) in the Łódź Studies in Language series, edited by Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk. This book, which contains seven chapters, a bibliography, two appendices, and an index, presents a very wellwritten, thorough examination of variation in legal language. Goźdź-Roszkowski's primary goal is to "demonstrate that the universe of legal texts involves not only different situational characteristics of legal genres, such as different modes (speech, writing) and different production circumstances in which legal genres are created, different participants and the relations among them, or different communicative purposes, but that legal texts differ dramatically in terms of their linguistic characteristics" (p.11). By comparing legal language through a variety of corpus-based approaches, Goźdź-Roszkowski successfully demonstrates that what has traditionally been treated "as a largely monolithic phenomenon" (p.15), is, in reality, composed of a variety of genres that each contain highly systematic patterns of language use. In the Introduction (Chapter 1), Goźdź-Roszkowski explores previous research on legal language, defines existing perspectives on categorizing text varieties, and outlines his own research within these traditions. First, while previous research has acknowledged that legal language is heterogeneous, scholars have primarily focused on describing lexico-grammatical features found across all legal categories (e.g., the use of passive voice, shall, archaic adverbs) or on describing one particular type of legal text (e.g., testament language or prescriptive legal texts). Thus, Goźdź-Roszkowski aims to fill this void by

There are many different ways in which modern Corpus Linguistics can be used to enrich and broaden our understanding of legal discourse. Based on the central principle of co-occurrence and co-selection in language construction, this paper reviews current applications of Corpus Linguistics in the area of legal discourse focusing on issues ranging from phraseology, variation in legal discourse, legal translation, register and genre perspectives on legal discourse, legal discourse in forensic contexts to evaluative language in judicial settings. It revisits the notion of ‘corpus’ and it highlights the relevance of various types of legal corpora and computer tools in legal linguistic research.

To date, there has been surprisingly little research on separate opinions in legal linguistics literature. Scarce attention has been paid to the linguistic and communicative aspects of how judges frame their disagreements. This paper serves as one of the early attempts to examine the institution of votum separatum, or separate opinion, from a comparative, cross-language perspective using a linguistic methodology. The evidence indicates a clear similarity in terms of how separate opinions are integrated within the respective macrostructures of the US SC opinions and the Constitutional Tribunal judgments. This study demonstrates how judges tend to employ highly formulaic expressions to signal their disagreement despite the absence of clear guidelines to communicate such stances. The analysis of their frequent phraseology demonstrates that declaring votum separatum and providing its justification are two different acts, not only legally but also linguistically, especially in terms of their formulaicity. The Polish and American justifications differ in the degree to which the frequent phraseology reveals peculiarities of judicial argumentation in addition to the presence of strong evaluative concerns.

It appears that we know surprisingly little about how judges frame linguistically the rationale behind their decisions and how such texts are structured. Using the concept of rhetorical moves (Swales in Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990; Bhatia in Analyzing genre-language use in professional settings, Longman, London, 1993, Worlds of written discourse. A genre-based view, Continuum, London, 2004), this paper adopts a genre-based approach to examine the rhetorical structure of legal justifications provided in the decisions of the Polish Constitutional Court (Trybunał Konstytucyjny). The goal of the study is to verify the claim that the way justifications are drafted is becoming more and more uniform and conventional. The results show that there is a common core of rhetorical structure realized by means of recurrent functional segments of text. This paper proposes a prototypical move structure of a Constitutional Tribunal justification and it argues that that the way justifications are drafted are subject to very concrete, even if not explicitly stated constraints.

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