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 ...
The Area of Freedom, Security and Justice ten years on: Successes and future challenges under the Stockholm Programme. CEPS Paperbacks. June 2010
This book celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) by bringing together the views of key practitioners and policy-makers who have played an outstanding role in thinking about and shaping EU policies on freedom, security and justice. 
 
Ten years ago, the member states transferred competences to the EU for law and policy-making in the fields of immigration, asylum and border controls, and began the transfer process for criminal justice and policing. This decade of European cooperation on AFSJ policies has experienced very dynamic convergence, the enactment of a large body of European law and the setting-up of numerous EU agencies working in these domains. Such dynamism in policy-making has not been without challenges and vulnerabilities, however. As this collective volume shows, the main dilemmas that lie ahead relate to an effective (while more plural) institutional framework under the Treaty of Lisbon, stronger judicial scrutiny through a greater role for national courts and the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, better mechanisms for evaluating and monitoring the implementation of EU AFSJ law and a more solid fundamental rights strategy. The contributions in this volume address the progress achieved so far in these policy areas, identify the challenges for future European cooperation in the AFSJ and put forward possible paths for making more progress in the next generation of the EU’s AFSJ.