ABSTRACT
Just as the law pervades many aspects of our lives, metaphors pervade virtually all branches of discourse, often reflecting the attitudes and values of the society that generates them. As claimed by cognitive linguists, our conceptual system is reflected in language patterns, which also involves the systematic use of metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 5). The fact that human cognition is profoundly metaphorical in nature has led to an abundance of metaphor research in linguistics, largely restricted to the realms of political discourse (Chilton 1996, CharterisBlack 2006), business discourse (Bowker 2009), and media discourse (Koller 2004), with few studies investigating the status of metaphors in legal discourse.
