Many legal texts are produced in repetitive and standardised communication situations; they are therefore subject to unification and are consequently characterised by formulaicity. Formulaicity can be regarded not only as a significant but also as a constitutive textual property. The aim of this article is to attempt to present formulaicity as a textual property and descriptive category of legal texts and to describe its characteristics both at the level of text structure and at the level of formulation, using the example of the German text type 'Gesetzestext'.

The subject of my contribution is the cognition in the jurisprudence. It focuses on the question of the methods used in the jurisprudence to achieve knowledge of the law and the importance of the language in this process. My considerations focus on the evaluative position of the jurist. It is based on the assumption that the choice of a view requires not only an evaluation but also a kind of hierarchization. Therefore the important question is which evaluations are displaced by jurisprudence, and which ones creep into the theoretical considerations. The arguments on this topic have been drawn from three texts by German jurists of the 19th century.