IMPLEMENTATION OF SEGMENTATION AND ARCHITECTONICS PRINCIPLES IN THE TEXTS OF JUDICIAL DECISIONS (BASED ON JUDICIAL DECISIONS OF SUPREME COURTS OF THE ANGLO-SAXON LEGAL SYSTEM)

Abstract

The relevance of the study of texts of court decisions in the modern world is due to both the social demand for the development of legal linguistic issues, and the need to accumulate, observe and generalize the research material of legal texts. Based on the decisions of the Supreme courts of the countries of the Anglo-Saxon legal system, the article analyzes the nature of implementation in the texts of court decisions of such plans for the structural organization of the text as segmentation and architectonics. Visual-spatial segmentation and fixed location of text components are important principles for organizing the text of a court decision. In the result of the analysis the author comes to the conclusion about the existence of universal and specific to different countries of Anglo-Saxon legal system implementation options considered principles that allow to organize and direct perception by a recipient of information that is essential to the accuracy, correctness, and unambiguity of interpretation of the content of such important documents as court decision. These parameters can include both generally accepted (paragraphs, text italics, numbering) and unique (selection of keywords as independent parts, summary of the content of the decision, content of paragraphs, list of references to sources of law (according to the traditional hierarchy of sources of the Anglo-Saxon legal system): precedents, statutes and normative documents, doctrinal sources). The structure of the considered court decisions corresponds to the classical three-part structure of the court decision, which consists of successive introductory, descriptive-motivational and resolute parts. The basic details of each of the parts are preserved in the reviewed court decisions, however, the nature of their location does not have a ixed framework. The features of the implementation of the principles identiied in the analysis allow the recipient to quickly navigate the structure and content of the court decision, which is of great value, taking into account the large array of case law.

Keywords

• judicial discourse
• supreme court judgment
• anglo-saxon legal family
• structural organization of the text
• segmentation and architectonics