This study on lay discourse about legal discourse analyses online public reactions to court decision on Sarah Halimi case, a French Jewish woman, killed by her neighbor in Paris in 2017. The psychiatric assessments concluded that the murderer committed the crime during an "acute delirious puff" and The Court of Cassation (highest court in the French judiciary), while confirming the antisemitic nature of the crime, maintained the criminal irresponsibility. Strong reactions in France and worldwide led the French Minister of Justice to announce in 2021 a draft law on criminal irresponsibility that aims to "fill" a "legal vacuum".
This study investigates the (re)appropriation of the language of law by the public following this controversial criminal law decision. By using texts from Twitter and foras (forum-actualite and forum-politique), the corpus analysis uses corpus tools (Salem, 2003), semantics approaches (Lecolle et al., 2018) and interpersonal model of meta-discourse (Hyland, 2018). The aim is to explore the legal meta-discourse by relying on modality studies to identify the injunctive, deontic, and epistemic discursive markers.
The analysis explores the relationship between (1) the public representation and perception of this murder case and (2) the politico-legal response to decisions about diminished responsibility. This latter remains a sensitive topic in several countries and a number of criminal justice reforms are revised or implemented with close observation of public reaction (Calvin et al., 2011; Mitchell et al, 2012; Noyon et al., 2020).
Hyland, K. (2018). Metadiscourse : Exploring Interaction in Writing (1re éd.). Bloomsbury Academic; Bloomsbury Collections.
Lecolle, M., Veniard, M., & Guérin, O. (2018). Pour une sémantique discursive : Propositions et illustrations. Langages, 210(2), 35‑54.
Noyon, L., De Keijser, J., & Crijns, J. (2020). Legitimacy and public opinion: A five-step model. International Journal of Law in Context, 16(4), 390-402.
Salem, A., et al., (2003). Lexico3 : Outils de statistique textuelle. Manuel d'utilisation. Lexi&co.
