ABSTRACT
The chapter offers an integrated perspective on the issues of transparency, power and control in legal communication. Communication, in general, and legal communication, in particular, is an act with consequences, and comprises performative utterances with effects. There exist various ways in which actors in the society have provoked public discourse in order to unveil the unsaid or hidden mechanisms of power and control, and then to call for transparency to all citizens that is, readability, visibility and accessibility. Legal communication encompasses complex relations across a diversity of languages, cultures and different orientations arising from their confrontations within space and time. 'Cultural embeddedness' is a key notion in effective, transparent and clear legal communication, which involves analysing the power of social institutions included in the language itself but not limited to it. The overall aim of a state is to protect the social order in which the individual liberty of the citizen is a major concern.
