ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the interaction between legal and other social discourses, including the discourses of other scientific disciplines. The chapter argues one reason for this situation is that this kind of discourse analysis approaches texts in a fundamentally different way from legal scholarship. This chapter reflects on discourse analysis both as a theory and as a method of reading legal texts. The chapter explores social constructionism as the theoretical background of discourse analysis and discusses its theoretical assumptions by contrasting them with the approach in legal scholarship. The chapter discusses discourse analysis in more concrete terms. This chapter contrasts the two basic understandings of the relationship between reality and language, which called as the positivist and constructionist approaches. This chapter begins with feminist legal scholarship shares the view that sex and gender are constructed categories but, nevertheless, quite fundamental to legal interpretation.
