Broadcasting legal discourse: the popularization of family law through YouTube

New media and Web 2.0 are having a significant impact on science and techno-logy for the communication of specialized topics from experts to non-experts (Garzone 2007). However, only few studies have focused on the popularization of legal discourse (Anesa 2012; Williams 2013) and even fewer on the impact of web genres on its dissemination (Chierichetti 2006; Garzone 2014; Eng-berg/Luttermann 2014). Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, no empirical research has been conducted on the use of broadcast platforms, i.e. YouTube, to popularize legal topics. The purpose of this paper is thus to analyze the strategies employed for the popularization of legal discourse (i.e. definitions, denomina-tions, reformulations, exemplifications, cf. Calsamiglia/van Dijk 2004) on You-tube, focusing in particular on the specific branch of Family Law, as one of the most relevant and close to lay-people. The analysis is carried out on a corpus of video clips gathered from the Youtube channel of the well-known British lawyer Marilyn Stowe, the Stowe Family Law YouTube channel. Each video deals with a different topic on Family Law. Textual data is retrieved from the broadcast. From a methodological perspective, recourse to corpus linguistics and discourse analytical tools shall enable us to investigate the popularizing strategies involved (Calsamiglia/van Dijk 2004; Garzone 2006) and the metadiscourse (Hyland 2005a, 2005b) used to guide the non-expert receivers of the video (textual meta-discourse) through legal issues, and to let the audience take part in knowledge construction (interpersonal metadiscourse).