An attempt at redefining legal English contexts

The article is an endeavour to delineate and classify statutory texts in English contingent on the various legal contexts they originate in. It starts with an overview and a critique of the different classifications of legal traditions followed by a proposal for an approach to systematizing legal systems based on Bhatia’s (2010) multidimensional and multi-perspective model for analysing written discourse which underpins the importance of context in genre theory.