Litigants-in-person as intruders in court
The common saying that “the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client”1 conveys the view held by many legal professionals. Self-represented litigants experience many difficulties, which range from having to manage various administrative tasks and legal matters to standing before court and interacting with legal professionals and witnesses. Yet many lay people do choose to represent themselves and self-representation is especially common in divorce cases and small claims cases. Litigants opt for self-representation even in high-profile cases. The list of some of the notorious cases from the USA and UK is very versatile: John Allen Muhammad v. the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2003 (after presenting his opening speech, the defendant agreed to being represented by an attorney); Farhad v. United States in 1998-1999; USA v. Zacarias Moussaoui in 2002-2006 (the defendant was ordered to proceed with a court appointed attorney later in the course of the trial); Colin Ferguson v. USA in 1994; Kolender v. Lawson in 1983; David Irving v. Pinguin Books Ltd and Deborah Lipstadt in 2000; McDonald’s Corporation v. Helen Steel and David Morris in 1994-1996. There have also been cases with pro se litigants before International Criminal Tribunals2: a former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, represented himself in 2002-2004; the first president of the Republic of Serbia, Radovan Karadžic, represented himself in 2008-2009. Social, educational and financial background of the above-mentioned selfrepresented litigants widely varies; their reasons for representing themselves
Say and stancetaking in courtroom talk: a corpus-assisted study
Approached as an interactional phenomenon, stance is realised through varied linguistic devices and practices which need not be overtly evaluative. Say, the basic communication verb which indicates the source of knowledge and, thus, perspectivises the information imparted by speakers, is one such resource. Its stancetaking potential is exploited, among other settings, in the courtroom or in the police interview room, where institutional authority is exerted and the facts of legal stories are ‘fixed’ and formulated (Holt and Johnson, 2010; and Johnson, 2014). Combining corpus and discourse-analytic perspectives (Partington et al., 2013), this study explores the patterns of use and distribution of the verb say in a libel trial, demonstrating its role in the interactional co-construction of stance. It also provides insight into how more powerful participants use say as a means of claiming epistemic priority and asserting authority – or more broadly, to position themselves towards less powerful speakers. The ...
Old English Manuscripts in the Early Age of Print: Matthew Parker and his Scribes
Covering the first dedicated program in the study of and publication of Anglo-Saxon texts, my dissertation examines the sixteenth-century origins of medieval studies as an academic discipline. By placing recent scholarship on media, materiality, cognition, and intellectual history in conversation with traditional paleographical methods on medieval and renaissance manuscript culture, I argue for a new way of understanding how early modern scholars studied and presented the medieval past. I take as my focus a corpus of emulative Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions produced under Elizabethan Archbishop Matthew Parker. Equal parts facsimile and edition, these transcriptions are a unique example of early modern scholars navigating the often competing demands of late sixteenth century manuscript and print culture. This dissertation is, in part, an attempt to catalogue and document the extent of Parkerian Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions. Temporally displaced from their source texts, Parker and his scribes directly modified many of the medieval manuscripts they recovered by editing, rebinding, cropping, and annotating them according to their own interpretive desires and publication needs. These transcriptions place Parker’s early modern scribes into the textual community of early medieval scribal culture, but their printed manuscript editions are an attempt to bring medieval documents into contemporary discourse. They developed new typefaces modeled on manuscript exemplars and attempted to reframe the printed version of a medieval text as an authoritative surrogate