Legal Latin in the Decisions of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal: A Corpus-Linguistic Perspective

Legal Latin remains a salient yet understudied component of contemporary judicial discourse. This study presents the first large-scale, genre-based corpus analysis of Latinisms in the decisions of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal (CT). Drawing on an exhaustive monolingual corpus comprising all digitally available CT judgments and orders issued in the period 1997–2024, it examines the synchronic and diachronic distribution as well as the discursive functions of Latin terms, phrases, and maxims in constitutional adjudication. To this end, a mixed corpus-driven and corpus-based methodology integrates automated retrieval with manual concordance analysis. The quantitative analysis reveals clear genre-based variation: judgments exhibit a broader and denser repertoire of Latinisms, while orders rely on a smaller, more repetitive set. Despite their low overall text coverage, Latinisms prove to be functionally salient, serving primarily as organisational and argumentative resources rather than as purely stylistic ornamentation. A stable core of Latinisms recurs across genres and procedural categories, indicating strong institutional routinisation. Diachronic analysis points to continued reliance on legal Latin over nearly three decades, suggesting that Latinisms function as a stabilising semiotic resource that reinforces jurisprudential continuity and institutional identity. The findings contribute to legal-linguistic research on judicial discourse by providing a data-driven account of legal Latin as a genre-sensitive marker of authority and professional identity in contemporary constitutional adjudication.