The Construction of Factuality in Pakistan’s Legal Discourse: A Stylistic Analysis of Logical Fallacies

Factuality remains the highest virtue of a legal text. The paper finds how this virtue is jeopardized by the presence of logical fallacies. The stylistics analysis is performed for identification of linguistic features of logical fallacies in legal language. Two randomly selected verdicts of the Supreme Court of Pakistan are selected for analysis. Analysis of verdicts reveals that factuality is compromised by fallacies with distinctive stylistic features. These features include the fallacies of relevance, defective induction and ambiguity. Lexical choices, syntactically complicated structure and graphological markers of style contribute to the formation of these fallacies. The findings establish that stylistic aspect themselves contribute to the projection of fallacies in verdicts, therefore, the study recommends avoiding stylistic formulae of the legalese or legal registers which lead to the formation of logical fallacies in the legal language.