Abstract
This thesis examines the concept of ‘privacy’ in domestic case law. It considers the problem of privacy, and issues relating to semantic and stylistic attributes that the judiciary brings to it. It then considers a set of linguistic tools (‘Corpus Linguistics’), applied through a software application (‘#Lancsbox’) to a body of privacy case law, to identify patterns of linguistic construction. The thesis then describes an epistemological focus, derived from the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu, with which these linguistic patterns can be interpreted, and placed into the wider context of the social forces underlying the practices of the ‘juridical field’. There follows a case law review in which themes and patterns within domestic privacy case law are identified and discussed. The corpus linguistic methods are delineated and then applied to a corpus of case law, and to a base corpus representing the generality of British, English text, to obtain lists of keywords, collocates, recurrent ‘clusters’, and text samples (‘Concordances’).These data are examined according to the discussed Bourdieusian perspective. It is found that the data from the 2 corpora are remarkably different in their stylistic and semantic representation of privacy, suggesting that the judicial construction of privacy is markedly different from its construction outside the juridical field. The ‘meanings’ of privacy are narrowed within the context of domestic case law, when compared with other genres and styles of text, confirming a narrowing of discourse around the meanings of privacy by the juridical field. Within this ‘narrowed discourse’ of judicially defined privacy there are recurrent themes, confirming discursive influences from other fields, such as the fields of commerce and the media. There follows a discussion of some of the socio-political issues which may underlie these discursive themes that the court brings to privacy. This research has wider implications for future research into the relationship between the court and the media fields within privacy discourse, and in respect of the value of the application of sociological and socio-linguistic methods to legal issues.
| Date of Award | 6 Apr 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Maria Burke (Supervisor) & Emma Nottingham (Supervisor) |