Legal Linguistics in Italy

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the interdisciplinary academic field of legal linguistics in Italy. More specifically, it traces the evolution of this branch in this country with a practical approach, that is to say, mapping the bibliographic scenario that constitutes the whole body of research in Italian legal linguistics. The paper is structured in six core sections. After an introduction to law and language, it provides an overview of the main fields of research in Italy, the most important research activities, the academic situation and the editorial panorama, and a final overview that takes stock of the research map. The results of this brief scrutiny confirm that legal linguistics is an established and increasingly growing field of research in Italy and that a gradual move is now taking place from the historical and traditional studies on the typical traits of legal language into a more interdisciplinary area of research in which the notion of legal genre and the contribution of computer-assisted methods become crucial.