Defending through disaffiliation: The vicissitudes of alignment and footing in Belgian criminal hearings

• “Representing the client” involves a conglomerate of alternating footing patterns.
• Each footing pattern projects a distinct phenomenal field.
• Does the attorney come forward as the principal of the defense plea?
• Footing patterns situate the plea in a network of intertextual relationships.

Drawing on Goffman’s notion of footing, I demonstrate how the discursive creation of a legal reality is mediated by the complex interplay of alignments the attorney assumes toward (1) the client, (2) the judge and other trial participants, and (3) written documents produced during preceding trial stages. These footing patterns differ in the way they include or exclude the attorney and other trial participants in the phenomenal field of the discourse. However, they also draw attention to the network of intertextual relationships that connect the hearing and the time of the facts. This decomposition of the situated practice of “representing the client” into a complex of alternating footing patterns thus also contributes to understanding the intertextual structuring of courtroom discourse.