Mapping adherence to “facts as basis, law as criteria”: a semantic gravity analysis of legal argumentation

When advancing legal argumentation, judges should follow the judicial principle of “taking facts as the basis and law as the criteria.” This is essential for justice to be seen to be done. Studies on the discursive realization of the principle in legal argumentation is quite limited. Semantic gravity (SG) from Legitimation Code Theory deals with degrees of context-dependence of meaning in social practice. This study explores the evaluation of how the judicial principle is practiced by judges in discourse, using SG to investigate context-dependence of meanings in legal argumentation in Chinese judicial judgements. The analysis mainly reveals that legal argumentation goes through several phases with different strengths of SG, including introducing, assembling, arguing, subsuming, stating, interpreting and responding, and that legal argumentation often takes forms of semantic waves: a wave with a broader range between the highest and lowest strengths of SG indicates both the factual and the legal aspects of the judicial principle are realized in the argumentative discourse. The dynamics of SG can be used to reveal the extent of discursive adherence to the principle in legal argumentation.