ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a particularly specialized area of legal practice, i.e. American military law, and the manner in which its principles and mechanisms may be conveyed in an online context such as that of Q&A sections. The American armed forces represent the institutionalization of military culture, which encompasses the “military-as-context” and the “military-as-discourse”. Accordingly, military justice “aims to maintain order and discipline within its boundaries, including adherence to a host of requirements and prohibitions that have no counterpart in civilian society” and connects professional and personal conduct and ethics such as “disobedience, disrespect, or unauthorized absence” with legal provisions and practices. Military communication is a specialized professional discourse in its own right and seeks to avoid ambiguity and complex sentence structures while incorporating very specific technical language and terminology through abbreviations, references and rules that are based on shared and exclusive knowledge.
