Legal Corpora: An Overview

The present paper is mainly addressed to researchers and/or translators who are daily confronted with the legal domain in different languages and are willing to approach legal language through ‘real-life’ examples, to paraphrase McEnery & Wilson’s classical definition of corpus linguistics (2001: 2). With no claim of being exhaustive, the study has been devised as a practical guide, a tentative survey of the available corpora for legal language. Emphasis has been placed on three main areas, namely, England and Wales, Spain and Italy, for being the focus of study of an ongoing PhD research project. However, reference has also been made to legal corpora and subcorpora available outside these countries, in Europe as well as in the rest of the world. Primarily conceived as a classical PhD ‘review’ – the crucial step in every research study involving a state of the art analysis –, it can be viewed also as a preliminary map for those who are taking their first steps into the fascinating world of corpus linguistics. The practical approach is evident from the schematic method adopted: the tables and the final Appendix are meant to be useful tools for rapid consultation or comparison among the copious legal corpora listed in the paper.