Author's summary of:
Separate and unequal: The linguistic legitimation of legal ideology.
An attempt to establish the connections
between the 'micro' linguistic resources and the 'macro'
categories of gender, power and legal/ sociocultural ideology
in the American context. The approach is multidisciplinary:
discourse, sociolinguistics, gender, political economy, power,
ethnography, feminist legal scholarship, legal semiotics,
Foucauldian discourse, power and knowledge, Bakhtinian genre.
Uses Ochs' model of indexing gender relations, Foucault's idea
of discursive shifts, Sherzer's discourse-centred approach to
society and culture, and Benson's semiotic interpretation of
law. The data are five Supreme Court cases: Bradwell vs.
Illinois (1973), Muller vs. Oregon (1908), Reed vs. Reed (1971),
Roe vs.Wade (1973), and J.E.B. vs. Alabama (1994).