Abstract
A text has, not unlike a word, never one meaning and in particular never one forever fixated meaning, as lawyers experience often against their desire when they would like to find an “originalist” ground for their determination of text-meanings in law. Reading legal texts in the semiotic mode is reading sign meanings in connection with their social function, and, what is more: reading the sign whilst it unfolds into a diversity of meanings. To understand a text as an (social) action seems a risk. How can laws, conceived in the form of texts, ever be an act rather than a norm for action? The answer is, that speech not only creates communication and information but also a horizon of expectation and activity within which social acts unfold. A legal text is a hierarchically organized intentional unit of written speech acts, which is not arbitrarily composed but constructed for a social and political purpose, constituting a presence and function of law in society. Such texts are composites and surfaces made for a specific reception-situation dominated by for example the court, the judge’s decision, or the concept of precedent.
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Notes
- 1.
James Turney Allen, The First Year of Greek 162 (New York: MacMillan, 1918).
- 2.
The story is recounted in Herodotus, The Histories 30–53 (Aubrey de Sélincourt, trans., Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1954).
- 3.
Ibid., 50.
- 4.
Ibid., 51.
- 5.
Ibid. 51, This is even more puzzling
- 6.
See the Preface to this book, quoting Martin Heidegger: Poetry, Language, Thought. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) (originally Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959)).
- 7.
Anne Wagner & Jan M. Broekman (Eds.), Prospects of Legal Semiotics (2010); Jan M. Broekman & Francis J. Mootz III (eds.): The Semiotics of Law in Legal Education (2011); Jan M. Broekman & Larry Catá Backer, Lawyers Making Meaning: The Semiotics of Law in Legal Education II (2013).
- 8.
See, Jack L. Balkin, “The Promise of Legal Semiotics,” University of Texas Law Review 69:1831 (1991) (“Professor Paul constructs his school of legal semiotics around the work of American legal academics, and CLS academics in particular. Nevertheless, as he points out, there is a rich literature of legal semiotics produced in this country outside of law schools. . . . Professor Roberta Kevelson at Penn State has for some years now brought scholars from many different disciplines together at annual roundtable discussions on law and semiotics.”
- 9.
William A. Pencak: “A Conversation With Roberta Kevelson,” in Pencak & Lindgren (Eds.): New Approaches to Semiotics and the Human Sciences, 1998. Jan M. Broekman, “Why Would Law Students Study Semiotics?”, Semiotics of Law, available http://semioticsoflaw.com/site/. “On the contrary, any semiotic interest in law reaches beyond a law student’s instrumentalism. Students learn to grasp beneath the surface of the legal evident, which is in the course books and cases. Why should one study legal semiotics? Most certainly to leave one’s naïveté behind and enjoy the complexity of human life and law!”
- 10.
Larry Catá Backer, “Retaining Judicial Authority: A Preliminary Inquiry on the Dominion of Judges”, William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal 12(1):117–178 (2003).
- 11.
Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803).
- 12.
Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958).
- 13.
Edwin Meese III, “The Law of the Constitution,” Tulane Law Review 61:979 (1987).
- 14.
John Frow, “A Note on Legal Semiotics,” Social Semiotics 5(2):183,186 (1995).
- 15.
H. Walter Schmitz (Ed.): Essays on Significs, “Preface”, John Benjamins, Amsterdam & Philadelphia, 1990, p. V.
- 16.
Noam Chomsky: Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar, Mouton, The Hague/Paris 1969, p. 12, 37.
- 17.
A.J. Greimas & Fr. Rastier: “The Interaction of Semiotic Constrains” in Yale French Studies, Vol. 41, 1968.
- 18.
A.J. Greimas: “The Interaction of Semiotic Constrains”—Idem—, p. 86 f.
- 19.
Jan M. Broekman & Larry Catá Backer: Lawyers Making Meaning—The Semiotics of Law in Legal Education II, Springer 2012, p. 199.
- 20.
J. Kristeva: Desire in Language. A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Columbia UP, 1980, p. 23, 34.
- 21.
Ross M. Guberman (Ed.): Julia Kristeva Interviews. Columbia UP, 1996, p. 26.
- 22.
Donald Favareau: Essential Readings in Biosemiotics, Springer 2010
- 23.
Roberta Kevelson: The Law as a System of Signs, New York 1988
- 24.
Larry Catá Backer: “The Structure of Global Law: Fracture, Fluidity, Permeability, and Polycentricity” in: Consortium for Peace and Ethics, p.106, July 2012, at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2091456.
- 25.
Jan M. Broekman: Recht en Anthropologie, Antwerpen 1982 (2nd Ed), p. 209. [German 1979, French 1993, Spanish 1993.]
- 26.
L. Catá Backer, “The Structure of Global Law” see note 8, p. 107.
- 27.
L. Catá Backer, note 8, p. 109.
- 28.
Jan M. Broekman: “Law in Life, Life in Law: Llewellyn’s Legal Realism Revisited” in: Francis J. Mootz III (Ed.): On Philosophy in American Law, Cambridge UP 2009, p. 11 f.
- 29.
Jan M. Broekman: “The Multicultural Self” in: Theorie des Rechts und der Gesellschaft. Festschrift W. Krawietz, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, p. 144.
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Broekman, J.M., Catá Backer, L. (2015). Reading Semiotics. In: Broekman, J., Catá Backer, L. (eds) Signs In Law - A Source Book. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09837-1_1
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