In Pakistan, justice is often less a matter of delivery than of performance—a ritualized display that hinges on the language of law rather than its spirit. Courtrooms, judgments, and legal proclamations do not merely adjudicate disputes; they stage authority through syntax, metaphor, and scripted decorum. The language of justice, far from neutral, becomes a tool through which legitimacy is asserted, obfuscated, or denied.
Legal discourse in Pakistan exhibits a strong affinity for formalized, archaic English—an idiom inherited from colonial bureaucracy and perpetuated to maintain epistemic distance from the populace. Terms like prima facie, interlocutory relief, and contempt proceedings signal technical authority but also create a barrier between law and those most affected by it. This linguistic elitism ensures that justice remains the preserve of specialists, not citizens.
More critically, judgments often deploy impersonal constructions and passive voice—“It is hereby declared,” “the accused is found to have been involved”—which obscure the interpretive agency of judges and flatten moral accountability into bureaucratic decree. This syntactic deflection reinforces the perception that justice is abstract, automatic, and uncontestable, rather than human, contextual, and fallible.
Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive lens highlights how legal texts draw upon shared mental models of fairness, due process, and national interest—but selectively. When courts invoke “public morality,” “Islamic injunctions,” or “national security,” these terms are rarely defined but heavily loaded with ideological content. Their strategic ambiguity permits discretion without explanation—a hallmark of discursive dominance.
Furthermore, the visual and verbal performance of justice—robes, gavels, oaths, and solemn phraseology—converts the courtroom into a semantic theatre. Here, justice is not merely dispensed; it is choreographed. Language is the script that signals power, certainty, and finality—even when the underlying structures of equity are fractured.
Paradoxically, the same system that shrouds its processes in complex legalese often produces simplistic populist judgments on high-profile political cases. Legal texts morph into political manifestos, invoking national ideology or spiritual legitimacy. Courts may quote poetry, religious texts, or the constitution’s preamble—not to clarify law, but to resonate with public sentiment, perform righteousness, and secure discursive loyalty.
The inconsistency is not accidental—it is structural. The language of law adapts to its audience: impersonal and dense when deflecting scrutiny, lyrical and moralistic when seeking applause. This elasticity undermines both predictability and credibility.
For justice to function as more than spectacle, its language must be reclaimed—not from the vernacular, but for it. Pakistan needs a linguistic democratization of legal discourse that makes the law not just visible but intelligible, not just performative but participatory.
True justice is not merely spoken in courtrooms; it is written into the nation’s collective understanding. And that understanding begins with the words we choose to define it.
