An Analysis Of The Information Structure Of The Judgment

As a vital link between the public and court, the judgment functions as a declaration of the trial decision, an educational guidance, a display of justice, and a signpost of judicial authority to the public. Since the judgment recreates the procedure of trial and displays the logic of judges, it possesses both its own and the general characteristics of institutional discourse and legal discourse.This thesis illustrates these characteristics from the following two aspects——the external influencing factors of the information structure of the judgment and the characteristics of the information structure of the judgment.The Introduction describes the background, the methods, and the aim of this research. From the writing principles and requirements for the judgment enacted by the People’s Supreme Court to the disclosure of the judgment, improving the quality of the judgment is always on the schedule of the Judicial Reform. Based on discourse analysis, the Theory of Information Structure is applied to analyse the characteristics of the judgment in this thesis.In the first chapter, the general features of the judgment as a legal discourse will be presented in details. Meanwhile, the influence of the trial procedure and judgment-making procedure is also considered. Also, the external factors, the sender and the receiver of the information, and how the difference between them influences the information structure of judgment will be fully discussed.Based on the Theory of Information Structure, the second chapter analyzes the information structure of judgments. By contrasting the judgment with the trial discourse, this chapter mainly analyzes the narration part and the persuasion part of the judgment from both macro and micro perspectives. In the third chapter, the significance of the thesis to theoretical researches and practical applications are illustrated.In conclusion, this thesis applies the new perspective of the Information Structure Theory to observe and describe the characteristics of the judgment, in the hope of exploring the research methodology on the judgment and improving the acceptability of the judgment.