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Case report published In:
Language, Culture and Society
Vol. 1:2 (2019) ► pp.168–193
Report

The senator’s discriminatory intent

Presenting probative legal evidence of unconstitutional verbal animus

| University of California at Los Angeles

This is a critical analysis of the discourse of an elected state official in the years leading up to the passage of arguably racist legislation. It was submitted to a U.S. court of law to support the plaintiffs’ claim that since the legislator publicly expressed racial bias against the groups of people affected by the law, then his legislation should be voided because the United States Constitution requires that laws treat citizens equally. The fact that critical discourse analytic findings have been entered into the U.S. courts leads to the question whether such analyses of public pronouncements May ever be permitted to serve as legally probative evidence.

Keywords: critical discourse analysis, conceptual metaphor theory, immigration, racism, legal system, public discourse, expert legal report
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Equal Protection Clause
  • 3.Political setting
  • 4.Theory
  • 5.Data
  • 6.Method
  • 7.CDA of the senator’s discourse
    • 7.1The senator’s leading analogy: nation as law
    • 7.2Immigrant metaphors
      • 7.2.1 immigrant as invader
      • 7.2.2 immigrant as destroyer
      • 7.2.3 immigrant as criminal
      • 7.2.4 immigrant as alien
    • 7.3The senator’s narrative
  • 8.Testing the senator’s rhetorical devices in a larger corpus
  • 9.The senator conflates all Latinos
  • 10.Conclusion
    • Epilogue
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.00015.san
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