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The objective of this review is to discuss the state of the art at a difficult stage in the development of a subject‐field—when attempts are being made to translate the results of research into operational services of value to practitioners. Judged by the criterion of practical relevance, the application of computers in the law is a subject which, over the past fifteen years, has promised much, but fulfilled little. This is a sweeping generalization—but, as a generalization, it has some justification.

This article develops a methodological framework to support qualitative analyses of legal texts. Scholars across the social sciences and humanities use qualitative methods to study legal phenomena but often overlook formal legal texts as productive sites for analysis. Moreover, when qualitative researchers do analyze legal texts, they rarely discuss the methodological underpinnings that support their approach. A thorough consideration of the methodological underpinnings of qualitative approaches to legal analysis is therefore warranted.

By bringing critical legal theory into conversation with qualitative methodology, this article outlines a set of key principles to inform qualitative approaches to reading the law.

To construct this methodological framework, this article first distinguishes between qualitative approaches to textual analysis and the doctrinal approaches undertaken in legal practice and formal legal scholarship. It then considers how this qualitative approach might be applied to one particular genre of legal text: namely, judicial opinions, otherwise known as reasons for judgment. In doing so, it argues that robust qualitative analyses of legal texts must consider the unique characteristics of those texts, such as their distinct form, voice, rhetorical structure, and performative capabilities.

The methodological framework outlined here should encourage qualitative researchers to approach legal texts more readily and challenge the hegemony of doctrinal approaches to legal interpretation in social science research.

It is known that a mathematical ecological model and, in general, a particular methodology of modelling, can be considered a literary text written in a formal mathematical language. In this context, stylometric mathematical laws such as Zipf’s (range‐frequency and number‐frequency) can be applied to obtain information parameters in different semantic levels within the same model. Adapts several of these laws and introduces new elements, lexic units, operating and separating units, to carry out several statistical analyses upon two models or texts. The estimated slopes in the regression equations obtained in the present work are compared with the results of previous papers where Mandelbrot’s law was applied and comparisons between them are shown.

A major difficulty in continuous speech recognition research is the lack of effective and objective evaluation of the statistical models of text. Herbert Simon's view for evaluating theories is here applied to the statistical modelling of text. Three significant contributions can be identified. First, a time‐series representation of text is used to identify three well‐known empirical laws of text generation. These laws provide an effective and objective approach for evaluating four leading statistical models of text. Second, it is shown that the Simon‐Yule model of text provides a constructive mechanism for those laws. Third, based on Simon's explanatory processes of imitation and association, an adaptive framework for continuous speech recognition is suggested.

In an effort to bridge the gap between applying translation corpora, specialized terminology teaching and translation performance of undergraduate students, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the possible impacts of teaching specialized terminology of law as a specific area of inquiry on translation performance of Iranian undergraduate translation student (English–Persian language pairs). The null hypothesis of this study is that using specialized terminology does not have statistically significant impacts on the translation performance of the translation students.

The design of this research was experimental in that there was pretest, treatment, posttest and random sampling. In other words, this research was pre-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design. This design was used in this research as the number of subjects who participated in the research was limited. Apart from being experimental, this research enjoyed a corpus-based perspective. As Mcenery and Hardie (2012) claim, corpus-based research uses the “corpus data in order to explore a theory or hypothesis, typically one established in the current literature, in order to validate it, refute it or refine it” (p. 6). Table I shows the design of this research.

The results of this research indicated that on the whole, the posttest results had statistically significant differences with that of the pretest. In this regard, the quality of students’ translation enhanced after using the specialized terminology in the form of three types of corpora. Indeed, there was a general trend in the improved quality of the novice translators in translating specialized and subject-field terminologies in an English–Persian context.

This paper is original in that it probes into one of the less researched areas of Translation Studies Research and employs corpora methodology.

The contours of the question of transmission or jurisdiction receive a particularly sharp delineation in a recent judgment from the annals of contempt of court. How can the solicitor scandalise the court, without destroying the law? Consider Anissa v Parsons. It involves the doctrine of contempt by scandalising – the most feudal of the three legally recognised types of contempt used to keep “the streams of justice clear and pure.”⁵ And the question that the judgment confronts is the technical and representational ordering of law, and specifically the articulation and disarticulation of two orders – that of the court and that of law.

This paper aims to consider a more visual approach to property law teaching practices. This will be achieved by exploring the existence of “visual learners” as a student body, evaluating the use of more visual teaching techniques in academic practice, recognising the historic dominance of text in legal education, and examining the potential for heightening visual teaching practices in the teaching of property law.

The paper reviews and analyses some of the available literature on visual pedagogy, and visual approaches to legal education, but also introduces an amount of academic practitioner analysis.

This paper evidences that, rather than focusing on the categorisation of “visual learner”, the modern academic practitioner should use the customary use of more visual stimuli, consequently becoming a more “visual teacher”. This paper demonstrates that these practices, if performed effectively, can impact upon the information literacy of the whole student body. It also proffers a number of suggestions as to how this could be achieved within property law teaching practices.

The paper will provide support for early-career academic practitioners, who are entering a teaching profession in a period of accelerated and continual change, by presenting an overview of pedagogic practices in the area. It will also provide a stimulus for those currently teaching on property law modules and support their transition to a more visual form of teaching practice.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of visual pedagogy in legal education, and specifically within that of property law, which has not been conducted elsewhere.

This paper presents a guide to free online legislative and legal resources for non‐law librarians. Due to the efforts of the federal and state governments, in addition to the efforts of law school librarians, a wealth of resources has been collected and made available through the Internet on the World Wide Web. This is an excellent time for librarians in public and academic libraries without large law and government collections to take advantage of these new resources. This guide attempts to identify specific resources, show the scope of materials available, and discuss which sites offer extra features that enhance their usefulness. Some sites with good collections of historic and primary resources are also included.

Legal reference has gone public. Ten years ago, tables of cases, Supreme Court digests and legal encyclopedias were confined to an esoteric circle of law libraries. Today, in the wake of activism, consumerism and sunshine laws, the public at large has demanded and received legal reference tools hither‐to unheard of in the public libraries and general academic collections.

This chapter is concerned with the question that is indigeneity, and its situation within literary and juridical imaginaries. As a persistently unsettling presence, indigeneity appears outside the law, before the law and beyond the law – indeed, in Derrida's terms, as an evocation of the unconditional. Whereas the law determines indigeneity to recognise it, I propose that its expression in Indigenous literature evokes a Derridean unconditional to which the law must perpetually, if momentarily, respond. This chapter elaborates a conception of indigeneity, as expressed in Indigenous literature, as disruptive and deconstructive of non-Indigenous law, opening its narratives to transformation.