Theoretical and Methodological Challenges of Interdisciplinary Legal-linguistic Research: Reflections from the GenDJus Project

This chapter presents some reflections from the interdisciplinary research project GenDJus by focusing on its theoretical and methodological challenges. More specifically, it aims at discussing the theoretical and methodological pillars upon which the project relies underlying the main challenges of interdisciplinary research in strategic areas of the research project, i.e. the theoretical background, the data collection and the legal-linguistic analysis. In particular, it focusses on specific interdisciplinary ventures stemming from the combination and integration of law and linguistics. The research project, which aims at investigating the role of prejudice, stereotypes and bias in human rights law and discourse about sexual, reproductive and parental rights, lies at the intersection of different disciplines and methodological approaches. The material of the project consists in a case law collection and a trilingual (Italian, Spanish and English) comparable corpus including judgments and other judicial documents delivered by the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the African Court on Human and People’s Rights, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Italian Supreme Court and Constitutional Court. In terms of methodologies, the project combines the traditional methods of legal analysis and the quality dimension of critical discourse analysis applied to legal and judicial discourse with the quantitative dimension of corpus linguistics applied to gendered discourse.