Legal communication is an area where English has increasingly been employed
by both native and non-native speakers. In an attempt to carry out a comparative
study, the aim of this paper is to focus on language variation in the genre of judgments.
For this purpose, a key feature of judicial texts, namely conditionality, was
studied. On the basis of a collection of recent EU and Irish judgments, a large sample
of conditional subordinators was analysed. Data showed that conditional clauses
mainly express what Quirk et al. (1985) call direct open conditions. More specifically,
there is evidence that conditionals occur in four outstanding contexts: the
expression of obligations; the formulation of conditions under which permissions
are granted; the laying down of prohibitions; and the expression of the judge’s recommendations.
Finally, an important role is also played by the second category of
direct condition identified by Quirk at al. (1985), i.e. hypothetical conditions. Taken
together, data appear to suggest that language-relevant findings are indicative of
interesting differences also to be read in terms of underlying legal culture.
