Reconstructing a legislative procedure for ‘error’ detection: the Rywingate case

Abstract

Today we are witnessing a spread of interest in specialist communication, with a focus on specific configurations of features of texts, users, and contexts. Specialization in linguistics, matched by a growing bond between language and social policies, may well be a sign of the times. On the other hand, compartmentalization in or through language is hard to sustain given the growth of inter-communication between specialists or a genuine social pressure to ‘translate’ the technical (professional, cryptic) into the common (practical, popular or socially functional). Such mediation of discourses is also enhanced by the expectations of modern democratic societies that are becoming more open, educated, mobile and technologically capable. It gains additional impact from mediatization of discourses and commodification of information. The present paper looks at such osmotic traces in specialist communication in the legal domain. A case in point is a recent failure in a legal procedure in Poland, an apparent ‘error’ in the Media Bill, and its link to a corruption scandal. The paper gives a comprehensive analysis of how the legislative procedure was reconstructed during the hearings, and how it was covered in the media. The major purpose of the paper is to show how power in legal document design is discursively constructed, redefined, allocated and denounced. Given the lamination of social roles and identities, it is shown how various actors in the social construction of the law dispute authority and responsibility. It is illustrated how, under pressure, the responsibility of the lawmaker is laminated away from the institution, and ‘diluted’ in a detective-style of reconstruction of the events.