The crime of insult: Legal regulation and language analysis of insult in court judgments

Abstract

The importance of criminal law protection of honor and reputation and imprecise legal conceptual determination of insult, as a basic and general criminal offense against honor and reputation, pointed to the need to determine in theory and court practice the parameters that will help the courts when deciding whether in the particular case the criminal offense of insult exists or not. On this occasion, an objective criterion is applied, according to which an insulting statement is assessed from the aspect of existing customary, moral, and other norms in specific time and space. The variability of the concept of honor, which often changes its content and scope, also creates the need for language analysis of the degrading statements, which can sometimes be helpful in assessing whether in a particular case there is a criminal offense of insult or not. Connecting law with linguistics provides an interdisciplinary overview of the relationship of language, style, and composition of legal documents and their conditionality by specifics of individual fields of law. The attitude to the use of language which exists in legal theory and practice is significant and worth studying, and in the focus of interdisciplinary contribution to this issue, there is a criminal law overview of the use of language tools in criminal offenses against honor and reputation. The legal part of the analysis was used, above all, the dogmatic method in order to determine the true meaning of the analyzed norms, and the normative method as a method of studying the social function of the norms. The historical method was used to show the criminal protection of honor and reputation in various historical periods, which was accompanied by the use of the sociological method to explain social factors of occurrence and development of the phenomena. In order to assess existing normative solutions, the axiological method was used. The language analysis of the criminal offense of insult was performed using a descriptive method, and the content analysis was used as a research technique. For the purposes of research, a special sample was formed, which consists of thirty judgments for the criminal offense of insult. In the corpus of the court judgments of Kragujevac courts, the repertoire of lexical assets used for the purpose of injury to honor and reputation was separated. Sublings of the mother, pejoratives, vulgarism, metaphorical nominations with negative connotation, and lexemes marked by the bearer of socially unacceptable traits and ethnicities used with derogatory meaning are among the most common funds. Public insults in writing, in the form of comments on social networks or forums, have greater weight than orally imposed insults in the presence of several faces.

Keywords

• honor
• reputation
• criminal law protection
• insult
• language analysis