In Terms of Official Record: a Study of the Connections between Legal Language, Everyday Worklife and Organizational Context

Abstract

Russian legal language has little to do with everyday Russian. At the same time, it is very stable. Its evolution during the last century was insignificant, especially in the field of criminal justice. This article is focused on investigators' reports, bills of particulars and other documents of the pretrial stage of criminal prosecution. We are analyzing these materials in the context of the professional activity of Russian investigators and their professional socialization. The article shows that the process of professional socialization and learning the professional (legal) language is informal and mostly disconnect from formal legal education. The article describes different forms of investigators' socialization in their workplace and different groups of professional skills. We focus our research on the skills of professional writing. Legal guidelines teach us that the key question for the investigator is «How to classify this violation of law?». This is not true. The investigator is a storyteller. He/she has to bring fragments of evidence and his/her own interpretations together into the integral picture of the crime, like some kind of mosaic or «the golden cage of evidence». And the specific writing skills are the key instrument of this work. The last section of the article is focused on the social role of this manner of writing. The formal and unified style of writing makes it easier to control the investigator's and prosecutor's (judge's) work. At the same time, this sort of language socialization creates and secures the professional monopoly and the closeness of the profession. The Article is based on the analysis of formal documents from casefiles, interviews with investigators and results of the corresponding sociological survey.