Visibility-conditioned recombination in legal-language research across four legal contexts

Abstract

Legal-language scholarship spans disciplines, institutions, languages, and bibliographic systems. This article develops an account of its organization across Common law, Civil law, Islamic law, and the Chinese legal context. Searches of Web of Science, Scopus, and CNKI yielded 9,290 publications through July 31, 2026. Legal context was identifiable in 28.4 percent of records and a focal context in 24.4 percent, while themes were more visible than methods. Theme profiles shared a backbone of discourse, translation, and terminology, yet source ecology crossed contextual boundaries: within each usable source stratum, the three interpretable contexts were more similar to one another than each context’s CNKI and non-CNKI profiles. Contextual variation appeared as functional recombination. Common-law records emphasized judicial reasoning; Civil-law records multilingual transfer; Islamic-law records discourse, terminology, and religious legal texts; and Chinese-context records translation, terminology, and drafting. Chinese multi-axis records increased from 6.8 percent in 2000–2009 to 20.2 percent in 2020–2026. Under the stricter context rule, the six initial shifts gave way to a Common-law discourse increase from 13.2 to 26.6 percent. The findings support visibility-conditioned recombination as a model of how institutional functions and evidence infrastructures shape the observable field.