This month’s Spotlight is contributed by Hub member Miguel Ángel Campos Pardillos, Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at the University of Alicante, Spain. His teaching involves mainly Legal English and English-Spanish Translation, mostly at a postgraduate level, where he has supervised a number of PhD dissertations related to translation and languages for specific purposes. He is currently working on three main areas: metaphor in legal language; legal English as a lingua franca; and the influence of ESL in the learning of legal Spanish as a third language.

In this brief note, I would like to share my enthusiasm and curiosity for legal metaphor, one of the most interesting and revealing characteristics of legal language, given its central function in the way law is perceived and its potential for legal argumentation.

Although many legal practitioners tend to believe metaphor has no place in legal language, and even should be avoided — or as Judge Cardozo put it, “narrowly watched” — metaphors are essential in order to understand abstract concepts like the law. Unlike physical objects, which may be seen or touched, the law is about right and wrong, about guilt and innocence, and therefore the human mind needs to relate it to something it can easily perceive. For example, when it is said that “Under the 1999 Act, the Government must…”, the word “under” conveys the idea that the law occupies a higher level and thus governs everything underneath. In turn, this is a logical result from the general metaphor whereby “control is up, things controlled are down”, one of the metaphors “we live by” (Lakoff & Johnson 1980). It is also present in the idea of judges “handing down” a judgment. Similarly, the daily metaphorical conception of “seeing is understanding” leads to the notion of “legal penumbra”, the area where certainty ceases to exist.
Some legal metaphors are “international”, or at least are transmitted from one language to another and may be traced to classical sources. For instance, the notion of “burden” of proof, connected to the idea that “responsibility is a burden”, comes from the Latin expression onus probandi, and may be found in many languages influenced by the Western tradition, such as Spanish (carga de la prueba), German (Beweislast) or Italian (onere della prova). The same happens in nations sharing a common legal framework, e.g. the countries in the European Union where the multilingual versions of regulations lead to shared metaphors in many languages, such as the “pillars” of the European Union, the “harmonization” or “approximation” of laws, or the “recognition” of judicial decisions.

Legal metaphor plays a central role in legal argumentation. For instance, when a piece of evidence is described as “the fruit of the poisonous tree”, because it has been obtained by infringing a legal rule, this automatically places it on the “wrong” side of the law, and perfectly justifies its suppression, lest it endanger the whole case and, as in the Genesis story, lead to original sin and expulsion from Paradise. Similarly, when crime is portrayed as a “disease”, an “epidemic” or a “plague”, following the discourse of politicians, the harshest measures may be applied as they are seen as justifiable for the common good. More specifically, in the common law system, metaphors have been found in judges’ sentencing remarks, where sentences imposed are justified by describing offenders as “story-tellers” or “predators” causing “devastating impact” upon victims. The judge’s reasoning process may also be described by means of the “reasoning as physical progress” metaphor in terms of “starting points”, “steps”, “guidelines” and “thresholds”. Metaphor, as we mentioned earlier, is crucial for the promotion of international judicial cooperation, where justice is seen as a building (“pillars”, “foundations” of cooperation), problems are seen as “barriers” or “obstacles” that must be “remedied” or “alleviated”, and regulations are seen as “tools” or “instruments”.

Given the importance of metaphor in legal language, I feel that it should be incorporated into legal language courses for non-native speakers. This would fulfill a dual purpose. On the one hand, it would facilitate general communication and help avoid the incorrect literal translation of metaphors from one’s source language. On the other, such training would benefit legal communication in particular, as I describe in my article “Increasing Metaphor Awareness in Legal English Teaching“.