ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the working dress worn in higher criminal and civil courts in England and Wales by judges, barristers and other advocates, solicitors, court clerks and court ushers. The concept of 'speech community' is broadly defined as referring to a sociolinguistic speech community based on shared linguistic forms, regulative rules and cultural concepts whose members inherit membership by birth, accident or adoption. Carolyn Kirby, the President of the law society said there should be parity between solicitor-advocates and barristers. The visual semiotics of court dress as a means of communication is comparable to a specialised genre, possessing a specific 'jargon', meaningfully encoded and decoded by members of the discourse community with reference to matters of interest specific to the community. One of the reasons behind this move away from a common and uniform professional identity towards the affirmation of distinct cultural professional otherness is undoubtedly linked to the need for barristers to promote their reputation as specialists.
