Textual travel in legal-lay communication

The opening chapter provides the theoretical and contextual background to the book and introduces the rationale for the sections and for the themes that re-occur throughout the papers. After a brief introduction to the notion of textual travel, it outlines some of the issues relating to the notion of ‘legal-lay’ or ‘lay-legal’ communication. It then explores in some detail the genesis of textual travel notions in the interdisciplinary research literature. Next it outlines the topics and themes explored in each of the four substantive sections: police investigation as textual mediation; the legal case as intertextual construction; judicial discourse as legal recontextualization; and crossing cultural and ideological categories in lay-legal communication. Finally, it considers the long travels of the book itself.