Judgments constitute the most important court document in every legal system in the world, which requires a complete and accurate understanding of it by both expert and non-expert readers. The main aim of this research is to analyse a digital corpus of 25 judgments given in England and Wales, countries ruled by the Common Law system. The main goal of this study is to deepen into those heterogenous court judgments in order to show their rich, but complex, nature by means of an internal description of the documents. The study method of these judgments, previously mentioned, is based on Teun A. van Dijk’s macrostructure theory, which semantically creates an interior design for a comprehensive understanding of the documents. The results of this study finally revealed an independent structure inside the document with some common elements that frame most of the documents. Thanks to this study, non-specialist readers and researchers from different fields of study, such as Translation and Interpreting (English < > Spanish), or Law (Common Law < > Civil Law), will have a first-hand description that summarises the most common features of such an important legal document: court judgments.

Keywords: Judgments, Macrostructure, England and Wales, Comparative analysis

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