Social Media in Legal Practice

Vijay K Bhatia retired as Professor from the City University of Hong Kong and is now a Visiting Professor at the Hellenic American University in Athens, and Adjunct Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Girolamo Tessuto is Professor of English Language, Linguistics and Translation, Department of Law, University of Campania ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’, Caserta, Italy.

• Introduction;SECTION 1: SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE LEGAL COMMUNITY; Environmental justice or ‘government overreach’: the rhetorical landscape of the Gibson guitar factory raids; Trial by (social) media: Anglo-Saxon and Italian practises in the digital age; Legally dead, illegally frozen? The legal aspects of cryonics as discursively constructed online by providers and the media; The fuzzy line between media and judicial discourse: insights from the Pinto-López Madrid Case; Ideological positioning in Amnesty International human rights web-based documents; Argumentation and video evidence in a legal context: an interdisciplinary case study from Brazilian military justice;SECTION 2: SOCIAL MEDIA FOR CLIENT EMPOWERMENT; The discursive construction of Hong Kong’s Civic Square in the media: contesting social and legal perspectives; Finding a way forward: a discourse analysis of the online popularisation of restorative justice in the United Kingdom; Helping Aussie women online: a discourse analysis of the Australian e-safety commissioner website; Discursive illusions and manipulations in legal blogs on medically assisted procreation: Parrillo v. Italy Case; Jag 2.0: legal advice and dissemination in online military lawyer forums; The web-mediated construction of interdiscursive truth(s) about the MMR vaccine: a defamation case;SECTION 3: CHALLENGES AND WAY FORWARD; The toxic proliferation of lies and fake news in the world of social media: is it time for the law to "unfriend" Facebook?; ‘Fake news’ as interdiscursive illusion: a challenge to law, social media, and free speech; Information and communication technology in alternative dispute resolution: is it facilitative or disruptive?;