Repository | Book | Chapter

This article, originally written in 1990 but hitherto unpublished, reviews the early history of legal semiotics. It considers the Semiotic Presuppositions of Traditional Jurisprudence (in particular, the different approaches to the language of Jurisprudence employed by John (not J.L.) Austin, Hart, Kelsen, Dworkin and some "Legal Realist" approaches (section "Semiotic Presuppositions of Traditional Jurisprudence"). It then reviews (in section "Legal Philosophies Explicitly Employing Forms of Semiotics") Legal Philosophies Explicitly Employing Forms of Semiotics: Kalinowski, The Italian Analytical School, Rhetorical and pragmatic approaches, Sociological and socio-linguistic approaches, Peircian Legal Semiotics (esp. via Kevelson), Greimasian Legal Semiotics (esp. via Greimas and Landowski), and Aesthetic/Symbolic Approaches. Four central hypotheses for Legal Semiotics are then (section "Some Hypotheses for Legal Semiotics") proposed (from a Greimassian viewpoint), relating to reference, the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, "semiotic groups", and the concepts of normativity, truth and (legal) justification. Section "Semiotic Analyses of Particular Legal Phenomena" offers Semiotic Analyses of Particular Legal Phenomena: the "Legal System", "Legal Institutions", Legal Codes, Legal Rules, Rights, Courtroom behaviour, judicial justification of decisions on law, and the Criminal Justice Process. The article concludes (section "On the Status of Legal Semiotics") with a brief discussion of the Status of Legal Semiotics as a meta-discipline.

DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-9343-1_1

Full citation: