BOOK REVIEW S. Azuelos-Atias, A Pragmatic Analysis of Legal Proofs of Criminal Intent John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2007, x + 181 pp, ISBN 978 90 272 27164 Bernard S. Jackson Published online: 14 July 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 This book ‘‘presents an analysis of the linguistic, pragmatic, interpretative and argumentative strategies used by Israeli lawyers and judges in order to examine the defendant’s intention’’ (p. 113). An Introductory chapter discusses the linguistic theories to be applied, and outlines the Israeli legal system. Three substantive chapters focus on causation and simultaneity, the reasonable man, and the distinction between two different strategies used in describing the parties (especially the accused). The texts considered in these three chapters overlap to some extent: documents from four cases are provided in Appendices (which the reader is apparently expected to consult throughout the book, in support of claims made in the argument, but without benefit of specific references). The final chapter summarises what precedes, concluding with an argument suggesting how some of the strategies discussed in the text may be viewed as creating the impression of objectivity, despite the ‘‘paradox of honesty in persuasion’’, according to which a speaker who honestly discloses his intention to persuade is by that very fact suspected. The author faces substantial methodological challenges, not only in addressing the communicational processes in the texts she studies, but also in communicating her results to her audience. She is (a) a native Hebrew speaker, writing in English for an English-reading audience; (b) a trained linguist who has taken up the analysis of legal discourse (apparently as her PhD topic). She clearly recognises that legal discourse has its own ‘‘codes’’ (in the linguistic sense) and that any analysis which sought to reduce the explanation of legal discourse to the ‘‘codes’’ of linguistic analysis would be inadequate. 1 Thus she has to use a non-native language to convey B. S. Jackson (&) Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: bsj@legaltheory.demon.co.uk 1 However, she is not too far distant from this in one of her accounts of topos (p. 13: ‘‘the topos functions as a bridging structure of inferences or, in Toulmin’s terms, as a warrant that connects a set of premises to their logical conclusion’’), which she applies in the context of the relationship between intention and causation thus: ‘‘human conduct is, in general, intentional and, therefore, unless we have reason to think 123 Int J Semiot Law (2009) 22:365–372 DOI 10.1007/s11196-009-9108-6