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The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established by the UN Security Council in 1993 to prosecute persons responsible for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars. As the first international war crimes tribunal since the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals set up after WWII, the ICTY has attracted immense interest among legal scholars since its inception, but has failed to garner the same level of attention from researchers in other disciplines, notably linguistics. This represents a significant research gap, as the Tribunal's public discourse (notably its case law and Annual Reports) can open up interesting avenues of analysis to researchers of law, language, and legal discourse alike. On its official website, the Tribunal claims that it has ''irreversibly changed the landscape of international humanitarian law'' and lists six specific achievements: ''Holding leaders accountable; bringing justice to victims; giving victims a voice; establishing the facts; developing international law and strengthening the rule of the law''. While a number of legal scholars have studied and critiqued the level of 'achievement' actually attained by the Tribunal against these metrics and others, of interest to linguists is the ways in which this work might be conveyed discursively. In this paper, we demonstrate how methods from the linguistic field of corpus-based critical discourse analysis can be utilised to explore the discursive construction of such achievements in the language of the ICTY.

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Nationalistic discourse is often associated with the flag waving of popular culture, political views of extremist right-wing parties or the routine rhetoric of `us' versus `them', pervading social life in general. However, nationalistic discourse is to be found even in academic writings by the professional elite of lawyers, who readily resort to ideological topoi of national identity and culture to support legal argument. Reporting from a comprehensive study on Danish academic and public debate on European human rights law, this article explores how the legal community of Denmark reacts emotionally and ideologically to legal integration in Europe. It is argued that the somewhat heated debate reflects points of instability within the social class of Danish jurists, who are engaged in a hegemonic struggle to construct or sustain positions of power within a national legal system under radical change.

No abstract.