Rule by law versus rule of law: A multimodal analysis of persuasion and legal ideologies in anti-corruption discourse in China

2021 ◽  
pp. 263497952110607
Author(s):  
Chuanyou Yuan ◽  
Yufei He ◽  
Yujie Liu

The authors conduct a multimodal analysis of the anti-corruption discourse in China by employing the SFL genre theory and the SF-MDA approach. Anti-corruption discourse that popularizes the anti-corruption mechanism and educates the officials constitutes an important part of China’s anti-corruption campaign. This paper first presents a genre analysis of a corpus of 51 anti-corruption videos on the official public legal education website to examine how these videos are designed in their overall organization to achieve the persuasion purpose—alert officials to stay away from corruption. It is found that most anti-corruption videos are expositions that are embedded with different story genres and emphasize the negative consequence of corruption on one’s family. Using Multimodal Analysis Video software, the authors then analyze the different reader stances enacted through a range of multimodal resources in three representative anti-corruption videos. Based on the detailed multimodal analysis, the authors finally explain how the use of linguistic and visual resources in the videos realizes the underlying ideologies of rule by law and rule of law and future implications of this study.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haider Ala Hamoudi

23 Berkeley Journal of International Law (BJIL) 112 (2005)This Article details my experience introducing clinical legal education into three Iraqi law schools. I highlight some of the cultural, legal and logistical obstacles that existed, and the means my colleagues and I used to circumvent them. By and large we considered our project at least modestly successful and certainly garnered the interest of many faculty and nearly all students who participated. Nevertheless, the extent of our success depended largely on the cooperation of the faculty and administration at the law schools with which we worked, and we were able to achieve the most at those institutions where cooperation was highest. Unfortunately, however, our project was limited necessarily in both scope and duration, and further efforts must be undertaken in order for experiential legal education to gain a firmer foothold in Iraq.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 113 ◽  
pp. 33-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomoko Ishikawa

While the rule of law was originally developed with reference to domestic constitutional orders, it is also widely embraced by international lawyers. This essay argues that the admission of counterclaims in certain circumstances helps investment arbitration advance the rule of law on several counts. The rule of law is defined here to include not only formal elements such as rule-by-law and formal legality, but also “thicker” elements attached to certain substantive values, including fundamental human rights. The UN's work on the rule of law clearly adopts a broad interpretation of this concept. This essay examines the potential for counterclaims to bridge the gap between the lack of effective mechanisms to hold foreign investors accountable for their conduct and the extensive protection of foreign investors in international investment law. By doing so, counterclaims in investment arbitration may promote the thicker elements of the rule of law such as accountability to the law, access to justice, and fairness in the application of the law.


2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 410-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vijay K. Bhatia ◽  
Stephen Bremner

The concept of Business English has undergone some major shifts in the last few years because of a number of developments, such as advances in genre theory and the coming together of English for Business Purposes and Business Communication, inspired by the realization that there is a gap to be bridged between the academy and the globalized business world. Drawing on advances in the analysis of business discourses, especially in applied genre analysis, this state-of-the-art review revisits the frameworks currently used in English for Business Purposes and Business Communication (or, more generally, Professional Communication) to suggest an integration of the two approaches for the design of English for Business Communication (EBC) programmes. The study incorporates an extensive review of much of the relevant published work in all the three areas mentioned above to identify some of the main issues in EBC, and illustrates a gradual shift in the rationale for the design and implementation of EBC programmes.


2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 954-971 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michela Montesi

PurposeA total of 17 user‐compiled collections of webpages, comprising 833 bookmarked links in terms of genre, are studied. The purpose of this paper is to find out whether users tend to bookmark certain web genres more than others. Genre theory helps to make sense of the different pages included in these collections, and to classify them, according to their communicative purpose and salient non‐topical features, into blogs, search interfaces, articles, tutorials.Design/methodology/approachA total of 17 participants took part in the research by providing their collections of bookmark links. They were also interviewed about the reasons for bookmarking and to comment on their collections. Relying on the interview results and on the previous literature, the bookmarks were classified into four super‐genres: main or access pages, transactional pages, navigational pages, and content pages.FindingsThe results of the classification into web genres revealed a clear tendency to bookmark main pages, such as homepages, which accounted for 42 per cent of all bookmarked web links. Moreover, some aspects of relevance were highlighted such as the connections to use, time, and context, as well as to the main web activity (browsing or searching).Originality/valuePreviously, bookmarks have mostly been studied as tools for information reuse, but very rarely as sources of implicit relevance feedback. In addition, from the point of view of genre theory, this research shows the importance of relating web genres to users' intentions behind queries.


Author(s):  
Jane Lung

<p>Undoubtedly, in recent years, the world as a whole, as well as the present world of work, has seen rapid changes which have served to bring about fundamental changes to work practices. Employees and trainers are thus facing greater challenges to achieve the required competency needed in this changing workplace environment. Bhatia (2013) observes that while the analyses of legal discourse have focused largely on ‘discursive practices’, very little effort has been given to studying ‘critical performance’ in professional legal practices, which is distinct from discursive practices. For this reason, this paper aims to show why discursive output has proved insufficient in the dynamic and complex discourse world of the present day workplace, as well as how the application of Critical Genre Analysis (CGA) greatly assists our understanding of it. By using critical genre theory, this paper looks more closely at interdiscursivity in public relations (PR) involving professional communication and how this in turn results in greater understanding of the changing workplace environment of the PR profession and helps individual PR practitioners cope with the challenges that they face. To achieve these aims, this study includes (i) in-depth interviews with public relations practitioners to gain their perceptions of their daily activities and the language and communication skills required by public relations practitioners to improve their effective professional communication, and (ii) critical genre analysis of the production of PR/communication plans, in particular, the Executive Summary and the Situation Analysis Section of the plans, to show the interaction between discursive and professional practices in the “socio-pragmatic space” of public relations contexts and how interdiscursivity is built into PR genres. For example, in order to examine the appropriation of genre and genre resources, it is interesting to consider: (i) in what way the Executive Summary of the PR/communication plans satisfies the requirements of sales promotional materials, and (ii) how in a very subtle manner, promotional elements are incorporated in the Situation Analysis Section, resulting in a mixed and embedded genre and discourse, achieving a mixture of  communicative purposes in the communicative context: to report and to recommend communicative actions as well as to achieve ‘private intentions’ within the context of ‘socially recognized communicative purposes’ (Bhatia 2002).</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 273 ◽  
pp. 10029
Author(s):  
Nikolay Saraev ◽  
Gennady Pratsko ◽  
Irina Korolenko ◽  
Ekaterina Marchenko

The insufficient level of legal awareness of Russian citizens is a serious problem of ensuring the rule of law and the rule of law, forms a general destructive background that prevents the formation of an effective system for the protection of human and civil rights and freedoms. Important factors that influence the formation of a positive legal consciousness are the quality level of education and training in educational institutions, the consolidation and development of the basics of legal consciousness in students, changes in the quality of education and training in educational institutions, including the consolidation and development of the tradition of respect for the law as the prevailing model of social behavior. It is at school age that active legal socialization takes place. The main burden in the formation of values for law-abiding behavior should be taken by school legal education. The purpose of the study was to study the regularities of the educational process for the formation of students ' positive legal awareness, the development of value orientations on the inadmissibility of illegal manifestations in the future. In the complex of methodological approaches developed in Russian pedagogy, the system-forming and adequate task of forming the legal culture of students is the methodology of the personality-oriented approach and the set of interrelated pedagogical principles of its implementation. These studies indicate the need to review the vector of measures carried out in accordance with the Fundamentals of State Policy aimed at minimizing nihilism. In the context of the introduction of digital technologies that provide access to legal information, minors relate the surrounding formations from the point of view of the law, focusing not on the process, but on the final result. However, the manifestations of the discrepancy between the legal reality and the fixed normative attitudes cause legal frustration, which often manifests itself in sthenic forms. The results of the study allowed us to come to a conclusion about the state of legal dissatisfaction of minors, due to the discrepancy between the theoretical provisions of the law and law enforcement at the active level of the value-semantic personal sphere. For the purpose of more in-depth scientific research, we believe it is appropriate to designate this social phenomenon as legal deprivation of minors. The specifics of the content of legal education allow us to implement it in the following forms: subject, inter-subject, educational, institutional, project. The most appropriate approach is an integrated approach that combines all of the above forms.


Author(s):  
Peter Railton

Is there a distinctive normative force of law itself, as opposed to whatever moral or prudential reasons might speak on behalf of law? Answering this question requires attention to law as a distinctive kind of social scheme, which limits the number of degrees of freedom in interpersonal interactions and thereby structures expectations and practices in ways that create “opportunity paths” that would not otherwise exist. Such rule by law can be given a purely instrumental, external normative ground, as Hobbes argued. However, as he also argued, rules are not self-enforcing, so that the well-functioning and stability of a system of rule by law depends upon broad social presence of an array of evaluative attitudes that could robustly sustain playing one’s part in a scheme of self-constraint and mutualconstraint—rule by law as an explanatory kind. An expansion of these constraints to include those in power can underpin rule of law, giving it distinctive social dynamics as well as a distinctive character as a normative kind distinct from morality or prudence, and help explain why certain human rights have been viewed as part of the rule of law.


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