of socio-legal practice – law, language and communication – and identify a variety of issues and contexts to reflect on the growing importance of concepts such as transparency, power and control with a view to offer a range of perspectives in legal communication. The issues of transparency, power and control were the central focus of the 8th International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law organized by the Department of English, City University of Hong Kong during 1-4 December 2009, which brought together academics, scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines such as law, public and social administration, linguistics and discourse analysis, and semiotics from more than 20 countries to reflect on the growing importance of these concepts and to identify the contexts in which these concepts assume crucial importance in the international community, and how these concerns and ideas have been examined, used and interpreted in a range of national and international contexts. Participants explored these issues from a range of overlapping concerns and perspectives, such as semiotic, rhetorical, pragmatic, sociolinguistic, psychological, philosophical and visual in diverse socio-political, administrative, institutional, as well as legal contexts. The current volume presents a selection of the papers from the Roundtable that were chosen by keeping in mind a variety of different contexts in which these concepts give rise to some of the issues considered important in the present sociopolitical order and to provide an opportunity for a general discussion of issues in the semiotics of law as well as open discussions to increase our understanding of the broader context of law, language and communication.