Call for Papers

The 9^th International Legal Linguistics Workshop (ILLWS26) will be held in Dijon, France from June 18 to 19, 2026 and co-hosted by the Austrian Association for Legal Linguistics (AALL) and the Laboratoire Texte, Image, Langage (TIL) at the Université Bourgogne Europe.

The workshop will focus around the theme

“Emancipating Legal Linguistics: Hopes and Challenges for the Independence of an Interdiscipline.”

Legal Linguistics has emerged in the Canadian tradition under the label jurilinguistique to address the difficulties of joint drafting and legal communication within a nation with two different legal languages, systems, and traditions. Since then, the study of legal language has developed into distinct subdisciplines in various academic traditions such as the Anglophone and European Legal Linguistics, the Germanist Rechtslinguistik, and the Russian yurislingvistika. These new interdisciplinary domains are often regarded as independent research areas, yet at the same time as special branches of LSP Research, and insulated from other more universal and non-abstract subject matters.

Situated within the broader field of language and law, Legal Linguistics now stands alongside more recent disciplines such as Forensic Linguistics and Language Rights and even appears in applied forms like Legal Translation Studies (LTS), juritraductologie, or Rechtstranslatologie, considering that the translation of legal texts is equally treated as a special case of translation studies. The aim of the workshop is to provide a forum for discussing innovative approaches, creating synergies and further developing the strengths of Legal Linguistics for the benefit of human beings and democratic societies.

With a growing number of volumes, workshops, and professional networks that specifically tackle legal language as a research area, this workshop welcomes papers exploring Legal Linguistics as an emancipating discipline, with a special focus on models and methodologies, specifically adapted to this field. Topics can relate but are not limited to discourse analysis, corpus-based research, specialized translation and communication strategies, AI and language technologies, legislation, comparative law, multilingualism, contrastive and applied linguistics, cognitive and epistemic aspects, as well as semantics, morphology, and syntax in law and in the context of legal methodology.

Submissions may seek to provide answers including but not limited to the following questions:

1. How can Legal Linguistics be conceptualised as an emancipating discipline within the broader field of language and law?
2. Which models, perspectives, or methodological orientations are needed to address legal language as a research object in its own right, rather than as a subsidiary of neighbouring disciplines?
3. How do different legal-linguistic traditions (e.g., jurilinguistique, Rechtslinguistik, Anglophone and other regional approaches) inform, challenge, or complement one another?
4. In which ways can research on legal discourse, legal texts, and legal communication contribute to democratic societies and the needs of human beings?
5. How can theoretical and applied approaches to legal language be meaningfully and productively connected across contexts such as legislation, interpretation and translation?
6. Which future directions, synergies, and challenges may emerge as Legal Linguistics, theoretical and applied, continues to expand across languages, legal cultures, and institutional settings?

ILLWS26 will be held in English, French, and German.

We are happy to announce the following keynote speakers:

• Prof. Dr. Laurent Gautier, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Université Bourgogne Europe
• Assoc. Prof. Dr. Martina Bajčić, Head of Department of Foreign Languages at the Faculty of Law, University of Rijeka

Submission Guidelines

Applicants are invited to submit an abstract of 250 words, including the title, theoretical background, research question(s), and methodology. The use of artificial intelligence tools in preparing submissions must comply with good academic practice. Submissions must be original, unpublished, and not under review elsewhere.

Deadline for abstract submission: 1 March 2026

Decision regarding acceptance or rejection by 31 March 2026

Conference fees EUR 50 per contributing scholar, to be transferred in full to the association bank account upon acceptance.

Organising Committee

Daniel Green

Karin Luttermann

Waldemar Nazarov

Laurent Gautier

Martina Bajčić

Claus Luttermann

Maximilian Hofbauer

Fabian Sekora

Sarah Atkins

Matthias Eder

Daniel Kopp

Bibliography

Bajčić, M. (2025). Visualizing the cross-construction of EU-norms through CJEU’s interpretative methods. In M. H. Girard, A. Guigue, & F. Prieto Ramos (Eds.), Jurisprudence – Revue Critique (No. 10, pp. 77–91). LGDJ.

Barić, S. (2013). The reasonableness principle in Italy: The practice of the Constitutional Court between interpretation and creation. Zbornik Pravnog fakulteta u Zagrebu, 63(1), 127–154.

Bhatia, V. K. (2010). Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-Theoretical Perspective. Continuum.

Docrat, Z., de Vries, A., Kaschula, R. H., & Svongoro, P. (Eds.). (2025). Courtroom discourse: Practical insights from legal linguists (Vol. 6, Studies in Forensic and Legal Linguistics and Beyond). African Sun Media.

Eschig, P. A., & Calnan, R. (2022). Contract interpretation under Austrian and English law: A short comparison between civil law and common law from a doctrinal and practical legal perspective for linguists. In D. Green & L. Green (Eds.), Contemporary approaches to legal linguistics (Rechtslinguistik, Vol. 12, pp. 3–22). LIT Verlag.

Gendron, C. (1978). La jurilinguistique: Contribution à l’étude du langage juridique bilingue au Canada. Presses de l’Université Laval.

Gibbons, J. (2003). Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language in the Justice System. Blackwell.

Glogar, O. (2023). The concept of legal language: What makes legal language ‘legal’? International Journal for the Semiotics of Law – Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 36, 1081–1107.

Green, D. (Ed.). (2025). The future of teaching law and language (Forum für Fachsprachen-Forschung, Vol. 172). Frank & Timme.

Green, D., & Green, L. (Eds.). (2022). Contemporary approaches to legal linguistics (Rechtslinguistik, Vol. 12). LIT Verlag

Lavissière, M. C., Cartron, A., & Gautier, L. (Eds.). (2025). Legal language and the sea (Foundations in Language and Law, Vol. 4). De Gruyter Mouton.

Luttermann, C., & Luttermann, K. (2020). Sprachenrecht für die Europäische Union: Wohlstand, Referenzsprachensystem und Rechtslinguistik. Mohr Siebeck.

Luttermann, K. (1999). Übersetzen juristischer Texte als Arbeitsfeld der Rechtslinguistik. In G.-R. de Groot & R. Schulze (Eds.), Recht und Übersetzen (pp. 47–57). Nomos.

Luttermann, K., & Busch, A. (Eds.). (2021). Sprache und Recht: Konstitutions‑ und Transferprozesse in nationaler und europäischer Dimension (Rechtslinguistik, Vol. 11). LIT Verlag.

Luttermann, K., Kazzazi, K., & Luttermann, C. (Eds.). (2019). Institutionelle und individuelle Mehrsprachigkeit (Rechtslinguistik, Vol. 10). LIT Verlag.

Nazarov, W. (2025). Frame-basierte Rechtsübersetzung: Frame-Semantik als ontologisches und rechtstranslatorisches Analyseinstrument am Beispiel französischer und bundesdeutscher Rechtstermini (Kontraste/Contrastes, Band 9). Peter Lang.

Šarčević, S. (1997). New Approach to Legal Translation. Kluwer Law International.

Tiersma, P. M. (1999). Legal Language. University of Chicago Press.

Vogel, F. (Ed.). (2019). Legal linguistics beyond borders: Language and law in a world of media, globalisation and social conflicts: Relaunching the International Language and Law Association (ILLA) Duncker & Humblot.

AALL24: Controversies in Legal Linguistics

The 3rd International Conference of the Austrian Association for Legal Linguistics (AALL24) is entitled Controversies in Legal Linguistics and will take place on 13th December 2024 at the Faculty of Law of Sigmund Freud University Vienna.

It is our great pleasure to welcome Professor Konrad Lachmayer (Sigmund Freud University Vienna) and Professor Karin Luttermann (Katholische Universität Eichstätt Ingolstadt) as this year’s keynote speaker.

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Karin Luttermann (privat)

Kommunikation im Recht: Linguistische Zugänge für Verständlichkeit und Vertrauen

Karin Luttermann is Professor of German Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics and Literature at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany. She is also a member of the Graduate School of the Faculty of Linguistics and Literature at the Catholic University of Milan, Italy, member of the advisory board of the Austrian Association for Legal Linguistics and at the German Association for Applied Linguistics, head of the section Fachkommunikation (Language for Specific Purposes); formerly member of the advisory board of Redaktionsstab Rechtssprache of the German Language Association at the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection, Berlin. She is co-editor of the book series Rechtslinguistik (Legal Linguistics. Studies on Text and Communication), member of the international advisory board of the online legal linguistic journal Comparative Law and Language (University of Trento). She has published widely and co-edited a number of books and special issues of journals within the field of language and law. Her main research interests are the study of language use and comprehensibility in legal texts and discourses and the relation between specialised knowledge and text formulation.

Konrad Lachmayer (privat)

Introducing Translanguaging as a Concept for Comparative Law

Konrad Lachmayer studied law at the University of Vienna, where he also completed his doctorate in public law. From 2013/14 to 2016, he held a research chair at the Institute of Legal Studies at the Centre for Social Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and was a research fellow and subsequently a visiting scholar at Durham Law School (United Kingdom). Since 2017, he has been a professor of public and European law and vice-dean for research at the Faculty of Law of the Sigmund Freud University (SFU) in Vienna. He visited the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Germany), the Central European University (Hungary), University College Dublin (Ireland) and the University of Virginia (USA). His areas of research and teaching include comparative constitutional law as well as Austrian and European public law, particularly with regard to democratic legitimation, the rule of law and human rights

We would like to sincerely thank our partners for their support in making this event possible:

PROGRAMME

Morning Session

Afternoon Session

Evening Session

Download the call for papers: click here