Representation of Foreign Justice in the Media: The Amanda Knox Case

Abstract

The work is interested in the use and recontextualization of certain legal lexis in the representation of mediatized legal discourse. Specifically, it focuses on the media portrayal of Amanda Knox, the American university exchange student who was convicted of and subsequently acquitted for the murder of British Exchange student, Meredith Kercher. A corpus-assisted empirical analysis of word frequencies and keywords is aimed at uncovering examples of recontextualization and misrepresentation of legal terms and concepts. The data are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. From a theoretical point of view, the work is informed by the notion that distinctive contextual characteristics of the system, culture, language, and society and the frames and scripts that these imply must be taken into consideration when analyzing (mediatized) legal discourse. Crucially, it argues that recontextualization is both a selective and on-going process, which in the case of mediatized legal discourse can lead to mispresentation of both rules of law and the systems through which legal systems acquire ‘their meaningfulness and meaning’ (Cao 2007).