ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how corpus linguistic methods can be applied to the analysis of the linguistic features of a specific type of legal document which is crucially important in the British Common Law system: Law reports. It offers a more detailed account of legal discourse by describing the traditional classifications of legal genres recognized in the literature, and the register approach to legal discourse. It then outlines the benefits and applications of adopting corpus-based research to the analysis of legal discourse together with some of the criticisms which this type of analysis has faced. The chapter also provides the diachronic analysis of the passive and active alternation in Corpus of Historical English Law Reports, 1535–1999, and then summarizes the main conclusions of this study. It has adopted a register perspective to analyze legal discourse over a timespan of almost five centuries.
