ABSTRACT
The examination and description of legal text has traditionally been approached from a prescriptive perspective, based on scholars’ intuition and expertise. However, corpus-based studies, which resort to large data sets, have recently gained relevance in the field and help the authors perform more comprehensive analyses of the legal field.
In that vein, this research attempts to compare two sets of Spanish and British judicial decisions which revolve around the topic of immigration. Following a previous work by the author Marín (2019), the lexical networks of some of the terms falling under the category affect, as defined by systemic linguistics, were obtained. Using the statistical data associated to their constituents as a point of departure, the scrutiny of these vocabulary items led to the identification of fundamental topics. Such topics illustrate the key concerns and the legal trouble that surround the process of seeking asylum or migrating to a European country in both the Spanish and the British legal systems. Reuniting families, the depiction of the living conditions of vulnerable migrants, or escaping criminal organisations – which children and women are prey to – stand among the most frequent scenarios which migrants are involved in as portrayed in both legal corpora.
