Legal Linguistics in Spain

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the emerging interdisciplinary academic field of legal linguistics in Spain. After introducing the features of the complex relation between law and language in Spain, the chapter aims at mapping the most important areas of research of Spanish scholars, underlining the main research foci. Emphasis is put on traditional linguistic studies, legal genres, discourse analysis, modernisation of legal discourse, forensic linguistics, legal translation, and interpreting studies. The paper also mentions the main research groups and projects, the editorial panorama devoted to Spanish legal linguistics, as well as the training initiatives carried out for legal and linguistic experts. The overview confirms that, notwithstanding the inexistence of a long-standing tradition in this field and the difficulty in drawing clear-cut lines of research, legal linguistics is constantly growing in Spain and it is witnessing a consolidation from an academic perspective.