Description: This book brings together academics and practitioners from a range of disciplines from more than twenty countries to reflect on the growing importance of issues such as social order, liberty and individual freedom in our international community. Contributors explore these issues from a range of perspectives as well as legal contexts. The collection examines the ways in which 'actors' in our society - legislators, politicians, activists, and artists - have provoked public discourses to confront the issues of transparency, power and control.
Review Quotes: 'This collection by an impressive assemblage of international scholars uses a wide spectrum of disciplinary approaches ranging from discourse analysis to jurisprudence to semiotics to critical theory in probing the social, cultural, and discursive aspects of power and its expression in the legal context. It belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in critically engaging the intersection of language, law, and power in the contemporary world.' Janet Ainsworth, Seattle University, USA 'An innovative feature of this volume is that the specific concepts of transparency, power and control in legal communication are discussed from a wide range of methodological approaches and disciplinary perspectives. The varied provenance of the contributors, both in terms of nationality and professional background, favours a very rich exploration of the challenging issues concerning the complex relationship between these three relevant concepts, which are increasingly raised in the present-day socio-legal world.' Maurizio Gotti, University of Bergamo, Italy '...this richly complex volume...with its wonderfully rich nuances, approaches, and ideas, inspires its readers to see law as it happens in everyday life in ways that are not always so readily apparent.' International Journal for the Semiotics of Law