The first issue of the journal "Legal Linguistics" was oublished in 1999. This time no one from  the editorial board expected the project will have such a long, intense, and interesting history. Over the years, more than 500 articles written by authors from various cities of Russia have been published in the journal. Colleagues from Austria, Belarus, Kazakhstan, China, Ukraine, and Finland were published in our journal.

In a certain sense, life itself pushed the editorial board to form more and more new issues. The demand for the design of a new scientific linguistic direction, the need for the cumulation of isolated efforts in a single center have been supporting by the editorial board until now. Undoubtedly, the catalyst for centripetal tendencies in legal science has been and remains the need to develop common methods for judicial linguistic expertise. This new output of applied linguistics did not leave indifferent many specialists who, on the one hand, accumulated experience of specific studies and demanded their exit, but on the other hand, fatigue from fruitless, divorced from life studies accumulated in linguistics itself. Thus, legal science not only “fed” on the energy of social life and the intellectual activity of linguists, but also itself fed linguistics with new ideas and really impacted social life. All this was new to linguists and those specialists in the theory of law who, by the nature of their activities, participated in the development of the linguistic aspects of legal communication.

The project "Legal Linguistics" was developed not only in quantitative terms. Its transformation into academic serial is quite noticeable and now we can see all the genre journal characteristics. The first step of the separation of genres occurred in the third issue, when it was decided to create a rubric “Legal practice”. In this section, published the original examination, which the editorial board called "precedentogenic". In the studies of the authors of this section, new methods were tested and cases that did not have direct analogues were solved. Then came the headings "Bibliography", "Chronicle, reviews, information", "Legal debuts" (this section was published by novice authors), "Legal dialogues" (section with discussion materials), "Legal studies in high school". The latter demands to say about a little more. Beginning from issue 4, the journal regularly publishes programs and curricula for various disciplines with legal background. It can be said that this is the second year of our journal - the need to unite the efforts of numerous philological teachers who teach linguistic disciplines to lawyers, economists, “international students”, etc., is very great; most of these teachers “stew in their own juice”, and the section “Legal Studies in High School” becomes for them a natural platform for the exchange of experience.

The proper journal content is a difficult task. In fact, we cover the whole spectrum of interpenetration of language and legal science - from particular methods, like phonoscopic expertise, to deep and global issues of the relationship between language and law. Nevertheless, during the years of the formation of the journal, the editorial board has accumulated experience in systematizing the material, and the rubrics (sections) highlighted in the collections speak of the zones of greatest attraction. This is “Linguistic Law (Linguistic Aspects of Law)” - this section concentrates the most topical issues of legislative techniques and legal hermeneutics (interpretation of texts of the law), “Linguistic Conflictology” notions of non-normativity), “Lingvoexpertologiya” (theoretical foundations of expert activities of linguists and the development of specific methods for the study of various types of verbal speech works), “problems of developing the state language”, “Lingvoecology”, “Legal rhetoric and legal linguodidactics”.

The editorial board also consider those areas of the legal-linguistic field that require special efforts and which can be qualified as prospects for the organizational work of the editorial board. Among them, the coverage of regional problems of legal science, extensive experience of municipal institutions on legal documents, experience of the media in the prevention and resolution of conflict situations, the work of judicial and investigative bodies related to speech practice - all these aspects of "local legal science" need the generalization and serious discussion. There is a considerable need for theoretical coverage of special issues of legal and linguistic activities related to the legal consciousness of ordinary native speakers - law-abiding citizens, participants in the dialogue between the state and the people, which is carried out in the language of this nation. Everyday legal consciousness undoubtedly contains a powerful linguistic component, since the functioning of law in society cannot be carried out outside its linguistic being. Finally, the linguistic aspects of international law, legal translation, and conflictology of multilingual interaction need scientific understanding.

Editorial Board