摘要：The aim of this paper is to describe and justify the structure and design criteria to create a legal English corpus of judicial decisions. The authors, lecturers of this ESP variety, decided to engage into specific corpus design due to the small variety of teaching materials and corpora available. Judicial decisions are essential wheels in the legal machinery of common law systems and, precisely because of that fact, they are fundamental as a legal genre. This is why we intend to compile a 6m word legal corpus of UK judicial decisions in order to establish the core vocabulary of the genre and use it for further linguistic analysis and the elaboration of didactic materials.
关键词：Corpus linguistics; law reports; ESP; representativeness; common law
