mgr Justyna Mika

ORCID: 0000-0002-8866-4738

The topic of my dissertation is „The human-animal relationship in the legal discourse”.

The main subject of my scientific interest is the broadly understood and multifaceted approached language of law, including both the language of legal acts/legal provisions and the legal language, understood as the language that lawyers use to talk about law (which can be reconstructed essentially on the basis of judicial decisions), and also, what goes with it, correlations between the general (Polish) language and the language of law, on the one hand, and semantic dissonances, the source of which is the language of law, on the other. In such a linguistic-legal framework my current research investigations, due to the fact that I am also an advocate of animal rights, focus primarily on the issue of the linguistic picture of animals and the human-animal relationship in the legal discourse. Taking up these specific research topics results from the conviction that it is necessary, for the real improvement of the situation of animals, to make the society aware of the vital importance of language, more precisely - the way of talking about animals and, what is directly related to it, the way of thinking about them. In the scientific dimension, therefore, the aim of my research is to show, going beyond the sphere of only superficial declarations, the legislator's attitude towards animals, which emerges from the Polish legal discourse, including especially problems of the objectification of animals and relativisation in the scope of the legally accepted way of treating different categories of animals. In other words, driven by the will to real enhance the legal protection of animals, I intend to demonstrate, with the help of factual, linguistic arguments, the legitimacy of implementing the relevant changes in legal texts regulating matters concerning animals.