A CASE STUDY OF LEGAL INTERPRETATION AND POWER OF JUDICIARY

Abstract

Judges interpret words. And words do not bind the interpreters; rather the interpreters give meaning to the words. This joint legal and linguistic research studies how judges use language to create new legal standards and social practices. The study aims to analyze how judicial speech acts function as performative actions in courtroom. It investigate how judges' language reflects cultural norms, legitimizes authority, and enacts legal reality by looking at significant court decisions, verdicts, and judicial opinions. The study adopts a qualitative research method to identify judicial language practices and products. Through in-depth qualitative analysis this research assesses judicial decisions under the framework of Speech Act Theory while comparing two cases to discover how judges create official legal changes and affect public trust in justice. The findings of study reveals utterances used by judges in their courtroom are 20 assertives, 15 directives, 6 commissives, 6 expressives and 8 decleratives. Using the Speech Act Theory as a base, this study reveals that a judge's words not only describe legal relationships but also make performative declarations that have the power to create and reconstruct specific facets of social reality. To sum up this paper, different themes from selected documents have been discussed which gives a roadmap to future researchers to further work on them.