International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

A selection

Aljanati, Lucie Pacho. 2017. "Promoting Multilingual Consistency for the Quality of EU Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (1): 67-79. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9482-9.

ABSTRACT: The process of elaborating EU legislation includes the activity of translation. Drafting and translation cannot be considered separately but are rather two complementary activities whose aim is the quality of legislation. In order to achieve the required quality of legislation, one guiding principle is consistency of terminology. This study examines the particular case of two terms in German that appeared in the EC Treaty: Entscheidung and Beschluss. The inconsistent use of the two terms was the source of interpretative problems, as observed in Case C-370/07 Commission v Council. A comparison of the contested provisions in the EC Treaty and the provisions in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union shows that the terminological inconsistency has been corrected. After the examination of this case, we elaborate on the impact of terminological consistency on interpretation as reflected in requests for preliminary rulings.

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Almog, Shulamit, and Lotem Perry-Hazan. 2013. "Contesting Religious Authoriality: The Immanuel "Beis-Yaakov" School Segregation Case." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (1): 211-225. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9264-y.

ABSTRACT: This paper will focus on two textual articulations that emerged in the Immanuel "Beis-Yaakov" school segregation case. The first is a declaration of the Admor from Slonim that was published when the ultra-Orthodox fathers who refused to send their daughters to an integrated school were imprisoned. The second is a letter to the Supreme Court that was written by an Ashkenazi mother whose daughter attended the "Beis Yaakov" school. A semiotic reading of the articulations reveals several opposing characteristics. The Admor's audience is determined by his choices of medium and rhetoric, which guarantee hegemonic reading, corresponding with the textual code of his interpretive community. The letter, on the other hand, represents an attempt to break through communal borders, and therefore its writer cannot expect hegemonic reading. Yet, she makes a considerable effort to employ signifiers denoting her ultra-Orthodox affiliation. In light of the hindrances that usually prevent ultra-Orthodox women from contesting the authority of the community, the letter presents a rare feminine voice, which is vigorous enough to attempt subverting under the authoriality of the Admor, and might have a long run affect on the quest for equality.

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Alwazna, Rafat Y. 2013. "Testing the Precision of Legal Translation: The Case of Translating Islamic Legal Terms into English." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 26 (4): 897-907. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-013-9331-z.

ABSTRACT: Legal translation is viewed as “a category in its own right” (Weston in An English reader’s guide to the French legal system. Berg, Oxford, (1991, p. 2). It is a kind of translation of the language used for specific purposes (Zhao in J Transl Stud 4:28, 2000). Legal translation requires accuracy in relaying the substance of the message, while respecting the form thereof as well as the genius of the target language (Zhao in J Transl Stud 4:19, 2000; Sarcevic in New approach to legal translation. Kluwer Law International, Hague, 1997, p. 52). As generally accepted worldwide, precision is deemed of paramount importance in legal translation. With this in mind, the present paper deals chiefly with the concept of how legal trans- lation can correctly be tested in order to ensure precision and validity for application and implementation. The paper will argue that the main goal of legal translation and the major criterion against which the precision of legal translation should be tested is to reproduce the same legal effect in the target text as that conveyed in the source text regardless of the method(s) used in the translation process.

internal-pdf://3422857286/Alwazna-2013-Testing the Precision of Legal Tr.pdf.

Alwazna, Rafat Y. 2016. "Islamic Law: Its Sources, Interpretation and the Translation of It into Laws Written in English." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 29 (2): 251-260. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9473-x.

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Alwazna, Rafat Y. 2019. "Translation and Legal Terminology: Techniques for Coping with the Untranslatability of Legal Terms between Arabic and English." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 32 (1): 75-94. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9580-y. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9580-y.

ABSTRACT: The issue of untranslatability of legal terms, particularly between originally unrelated languages, like legal Arabic and legal English, has long been a real challenge in legal translation. It stems from the conceptual incongruency between legal terms of different legal languages, which are derived from different legal cultures and legal systems. Such conceptual asymmetry is owing to the fact that law has no universal reference and that legal language is what determines the degree of difference in conceptual correspondence. The present paper argues that although conceptual asymmetry, which is the main reason for the issue of untranslatability of legal terms, cannot be denied in legal translation, there exist certain translation techniques which, if properly adopted, would resolve the issue of untranslatability of legal terms and therefore achieve acceptable legal translation. Such translation techniques are primarily controlled by legal, cultural and linguistic criteria that stand as a basis for choosing the appropriate technique(s) in Arabic–English legal translation.

internal-pdf://1566288681/Alwazna-2019-Translation and Legal Terminology.pdf.

Amorim, Leonardo J. B. 2020. "Reasonable Interpretation: A Radical Legal Realist Critique." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (4): 1043-1057. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09761-2.

ABSTRACT: The notion of reasonable interpretation of legal texts, as opposed to the absurd or unacceptable interpretation, is presupposed in different legal theories as the fundamental basis of legal rationality and as a clear limitation to chaotic behaviour by courts. This article argues that the ever-present notion of reasonability is not a useful descriptive tool for understanding legal practices or how legal institutions work. The article builds on radical legal realism perspective in order to develop two arguments supporting this claim. First, it argues that, from an empirical point of view, the complexity of contemporary law and its multiple layers of normativity do not allow for the description of what a reasonable interpretation is, since no coherent universal interpretative community can be envisioned. Second, from a conceptual point of view, it argues that describing the references interpreters make to reasonability as references to a semantic object-that is, to some kind of universal "reasonableness", a model of reasonable behaviour or rationality-is not a reliable way of understanding judicial practice in a certain legal context. This is the case because, as an internal justification discourse, the appeal to reasonability by the interpreter has no bearing on truth or correctness. Nothing prevents courts from cherry-picking a meaning for reasonability in each case, using it as the justification to solve similar cases in different, sometimes contradictory ways. In short, the concept of reasonability cannot be taken, in itself, as an instrument of legal analysis. As a prescriptive discourse, it can merely be one of the objects legal science intends to observe and explain. Its discursive functions-not its semantic references-, as part of a strategy to convince and to justify, are the only observable elements that can sustain a coherent falsifiable description by legal science.

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Andino Dorato, Jimena. 2012. "A Jurilinguistic Approach in Legal Education." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 26 (3): 635-650. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9278-5.

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this essay is to advocate for including jurilinguistics in legal education. It presents jurilinguistics as a tool for understanding law and therefore supports continuing efforts to teach it. Knowing it is not unique, this essay proposes a jurilinguistic approach that focuses on the in-between of legal translation and comparative law. The proposal outlines the importance of educating in the capabilities of teaching a particular subject in a language other than their official one. The idea is to let the Other help to understand the Self. Particularly pertinent in transnational law programs, it is a multicultural approach that not only recognizes the other, but also embraces it

internal-pdf://0304088560/Andino Dorato-2012-A Jurilinguistic Approach i.pdf.

Andruszkiewicz, Marta. 2020. "The Heritage of Cultural Determinants of Law and Literature: Methodological Findings." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09743-4.

ABSTRACT: During the second half of the twentieth century, the humanities saw increased interest in the broadly defined theory of culture and theory of politics, and in their study in a pragmatic cultural context. This was due to the influence of postmodernism, as well as pragmatism and neo-pragmatism. This approach is developed in cultural studies, which stress the importance of interdisciplinary research, combining the semiotic and cultural perspectives. The humanities have experienced a series of watersheds or turns (such as the linguistic, interpretative, political and communicative turns), and in particular the cultural turn. In consequence, the boundaries of various scientific disciplines are becoming blurred, while the scope of theoretical literary research is expanding. The integration of humanistic disciplines has intensified. This has an effect not only on the philosophical and theoretical study of language and literature, but also on the theory of politics and theory of law. As a result of these changes, various cultural objects-politics, the law, literature-have become the subject of complementary research. Cultural research assumes the cultural intertextuality of different semiotic objects, especially of text and discourse. This paper describes the influence of cultural studies-as a legacy of cultural determinants-on the law and literature movement. It also answers the question of what that movement can derive from cultural studies. The paper provides an overview of key trends, which may receive more detailed treatment in future studies.

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Angeles Orts, Maria. 2012. "A Genre-based Approach to the Translation of Private Normative Texts in Legal English and Legal Spanish." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 25 (3): 317-338. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9213-6.

ABSTRACT: This paper aims at clarifying some of the most common issues that legal translators have to face when dealing with the translation of private normative texts, such as contracts or wills, which naturally emerge as the consequence and expression of legal or juristic acts in the scope of private law, in Spanish and English. To comprehend the differences and subtleties regarding legal communication between the common law and the continental law countries (specifically the United States and Spain, respectively), we must unveil some essential clues for their translation and application in the global scope of professional interactions, thus creating a process of inter-legal communication, which takes place through the mutual interpretation and application of two, or more, legal traditions. Through the deployment of a generic or pragmatic analysis at textual or discursive and formal or superficial, strata, of two types of genre within the domain of private law (namely wills and tenancy agreements, or leases) this work aims to prove that both the civil law and the common law private instruments are translatable with respect to each other. An important proviso, however, is that their legal traditions and the genres that constitute the communicative tools of their specialised communities must be duly respected and kept in equilibrium, so that one does not overshadow and obliterate the other. Only in that way can the "convergence'' of the two traditions truly enrich and strengthen national and international legal culture.

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Angeles Orts, Maria. 2015. "Power and Complexity in Legal Genres: Unveiling Insurance Policies and Arbitration Rules." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 28 (3): 485-505. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9429-6.

ABSTRACT: The purpose of the present paper is to unveil whether the power distance/textual complexity duality attributed ordinarily to legal language applies to two different documents which are widely deployed, interpreted and applied in the global scope of commercial trade and communications, namely Lloyd's Institute Cargo Clauses and the London International Court of Arbitration Rules. In choosing two texts which are the direct product of the law-making machinery of the Common law system, but which are used internationally, we ultimately undertake to research whether opacity is really inherent to legal texts in English with an international scope of implementation. To scrutinise, illustrate and argue on the degree of difficulty and power distance ( and the relationship between these two) in such legal instruments, the perspective of genre has been chosen as the most effective of instruments provided by current Applied Linguistics. Genre analysis permits to identify the genre or genres of a specialised professional community connected to the communicative group it comes from, the audience that receives it, the historical and cultural background and the extra-textual reality it aims to represent. The goal of our study, carried out through different levels: formal, discursive and, mainly, pragmatic, is to discern whether there exists any possible equation between power and textual complexity, and the consequences this entails for the understanding of the nature of these major international texts.

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Angeles Orts, Maria. 2018. "A Bilingual, Bicultural Approach to Detachment and Appraisal in the Law: Tracing Impersonality and Interaction in English and Spanish Legal Op-Eds." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 31 (4): 805-828. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9561-1.

ABSTRACT: The present research study carries out a contrastive analysis between two corpora of legal opinion columns as special types of genres, with a view to assess their opposing patterns of impersonalityauthorial detachmentand attitudeemotion, judgment, appreciation, taking as a point of departure appraisal theory, or the interpretation of Halliday's Systemic-Functional Linguistics (1994/2004) by the so-called Sydney School. The long-established perspective is that legal genres are highly impersonal; authoritative instruments representing an intentional exercise of elitist and exclusionary practices. However, the hypothesis embedded in the present study is that some texts, such as news editorials and op-eds, constitute hybrid genres where the writer makes use of all kinds of inducement devices to support his/her theses with effectiveness and credibility (Dafouz in J Pragmat 40:95-113, 2008), nonetheless retaining one of the basic traits of monogloss legal discourse: impersonality. However, it is hypothesized that this hybridity is to take place in different degrees, in tune with the influence exerted by legal system that constitutes the background of each corpus. To prove such a point, 40 legal op-edsroughly, a thirty-five-thousand-word corpus in English and Spanish overallwere scrutinized, having been extracted from the specialized legal sections of two national newspapers of undisputed prestige as opinion-formation media. Through a contrastive study, the purpose of the present work was set to describe, explain and assess how lexicogrammar devices unveil interesting differences between the expression of impersonality and attitude in legal opinion columns as genres in either language, hence reflecting different ways in which the law is envisioned in each of the particular legal systems they belong to.

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Angeles Orts, Maria. 2018. "A Bilingual, Bicultural Approach to Detachment and Appraisal in the Law: Tracing Impersonality and Interaction in English and Spanish Legal Op-Eds (vol 31, 805, 2018)." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 31 (4): 1013-1013. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9577-6.

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Aroso Linhares, Jose Manuel. 2012. "Law's Cultural Project and the Claim to Universality or the Equivocalities of a Familiar Debate." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 25 (4): 489-503. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-011-9233-x.

ABSTRACT: Do our present circumstances allow us to defend a specific connection (that specific connection) between "legal-rules", "moral claims" and "democratic principles" which we may say is granted by an unproblematic presupposition of universality or by an "acultural" experience of modernity? In order to discuss this question, this paper invokes the challenge-visee of a plausible reinvention of Law's autonomous project (a reinvention which may be capable of critically re-thinking and re-experiencing Law's constitutive cultural-civilizational originarium in a "limit-situation" such as our own). The discussion is developed by recognising that the claim to universality is not only incompatible with a substantive conception of juridicalness as validity but also sustained with difficulty by a procedural representation of discourse and rationality (a representation which, against its own conclusion-claims, could also be said to be culturally and civilizationally bounded). Not forgetting some specific features of contemporary juridical pluralism-namely that which emerges from the counterpoint between semiotic groups or interpretative communities (and their differently assumed claims of intersemioticity concerning the signifier law)-this train of reflection diagnoses briefly a sequence of complementary main difficulties (as "obstacles" to recognising Law's demand as an unmistakable cultural project), namely those arising from the formalistic normativistic inheritance (confounding legal autonomy with isolationism), from the challenges and seductions of practical holism (justifying a continuum in which Law's project loses its sense and autonomy), and also from the familiar debate between exclusive and inclusive versions of positivism and non-positivism (a debate which establishes-consecrates an equivocal counterpoint between Law and Morality).

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Azuelos-Atias, Sol. 2011. "On the Incoherence of Legal Language to the General Public." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 24 (1): 41-59. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9176-7.

ABSTRACT: I will suggest, in this article, a possible explanation of the fact that legal language appears incoherent to the general public. I will present one legal text (an indictment), explaining why it appears incoherent to legal laypersons. I will argue that the traits making this particular text appear incoherent are, first, that a specialized legal meaning is conveyed implicitly and, second, that there are no keywords that could direct laypersons to the knowledge making this meaning obvious to legalists. I will conclude that any legal text having these traits is likely to appear incoherent to the general public and suggest that the traits making my example appear incoherent might be rather common among the various texts of the various legal systems. On this suggestion there is no need to assume any causal relation between lawyers' social interests and the apparent incoherence of legal language as it entails that this incoherence is inevitable. (I will argue that it is a result of the facts that legal language is ordinary language used, in the ordinary way, in the special context of the legal discourse.)

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Babie, Paul. 2017. "Reflections on Private Property as Ego and War." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (4): 563-591. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9505-1.

ABSTRACT: This article offers three reflections on the nature of the metaphysical 'wall' erected between the 'Included' and the 'Excluded/Other' by the concept of private property and its implementation in a state's legal apparatus. The first reflection explores the reality of the concept of private property, using Louis Althusser's conception of ideology, in order to demonstrate that the liberal conception of private property masks power operating on two levels: the formal, repressive state apparatus, and the deeper, the personal, the real, the actual level, which allows the Included to act upon ego in ways that negatively affect the Excluded/Other found in the ideological state apparatus. The second argues that the masked power that is private property permits war to be waged by the Included as against the Excluded/Other at two levels: intra-state and inter-state. This reveals a paradox in the distinction between Included and Excluded/Other: while the distinction demonstrates the allocation of power over resources, the reality is that every individual on earth is both Included and Excluded/Other. The final reflection briefly considers what could replace private property as a means of allocating goods and resources within a society.

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Babie, Paul. 2018. "A Great Exploitation: The True Legacy of PropertyA Review Essay: Rafe Blaufarb: The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (Oxford University Press, 2016)." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 31 (4): 977-992. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9579-4.

ABSTRACT: This review essay contains four parts. The first briefly recounts the contours of Rafe Blaufarb's thesis in The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (Oxford University Press, New York, 2016). The review is not intended to be a full assessment of the book; rather, Blaufarb's work sets the stage for the focus of my reflections, which begin in Part 3. Using Louis Althusser's understanding of law, we can see how the demarcation identified by Blaufarb made possible a further deployment of bourgeois law, which perpetuates the dominant ideology ensuring the concentration of resources in a small number of people, seemingly without obligation to the great majority who hold no power in relation to any resources. Part 4 explains the true inequity which this demarcation has wrought, establishing and perpetuating deep divisions between those who hold the social function' inherent in propertythe power unilaterally to alter social relationshipsand those who do notthose who suffer the alteration of social relationships to their detriment. In short, property itself is an ideology of power, the legacy of which is not equality, but exploitation. Part 5 concludes that the great demarcation, which Blaufarb so skilfully explicates, turns out to be nothing in which humankind ought to take any pride. Rather, it hasserved and serves the purposes of the few to work untold misery and hardship upon the many.

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Bajcic, Martina. 2020. "Linguistic Comparison within CJEU's Decision-Making: A Debunking Exercise." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09751-4.

ABSTRACT: It has long been noticed that there is no predetermined meaning of legal terms. Rather, meaning depends on the context and the interpreter (Engberg in Brook J Int Law 29:1135, 2003. fittps://brooklynvvorks.brooklavv.edthrbidtvol29/iss3/6). While this assertion holds true for both unilingual and multilingual legal environments, the Court of Justice of the European Union (hereinafter: CJEU) openly acknowledges it, by stating that no legal consequences can be based on the terminology used. Accordingly, by virtue of the principle of equal authenticity, when interpreting EU law courts cannot rely on a single language version. Adjudicating legal disputes involving linguistic matters in a multilingual environment-i.e. cases of discrepancies between different language versions of an EU legislative text-the CJEU has been given a fascinating role insofar as its interpretative moves include linguistic comparison, which in turn bears ramifications on uniformity and equal authenticity, as well as on effectiveness of EU law. With a view to unmasking the nature of the linguistic comparison carried out by the CJEU, this study examines settled case law, asking the following questions: What are the central moves of linguistic comparison? What role does it play in the process of CJEU's decision-making? Has it changed over time?

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Barbour, Charles. 2013. "Doing Justice to Foucault: Legal Theory and the Later Ethics." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (1): 73-88. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9281-x.

ABSTRACT: This article provides a critical evaluation of Ben Golder's and Peter Fitzpatrick's recent Foucault's Law, which it characterizes as a decisive intervention into both legal theory and Foucault scholarship. It argues in favour of Golder's and Fitzpatrick's effort to affirm the multiplicity of Foucault's work, rather than treat that work as either unified by a consistent position or broken into a series of relatively stable periods. But it also argues against Golder's and Fitzpatrick's analysis of Foucault's understanding of the law through a conceptual framework borrowed from Derrida, and especially Derrida's distinction between law and justice. It shows how this approach to reading Foucault effectively transforms some of his more powerful criticisms of the law into defences of justice. In place of this interpretation, the second half of this paper initiates a reading of Foucault's later work on ethics and the self in the ancient world. It develops the theme of an ethics, or a way of life, that takes shape at a distance from politics on the one side and law on the other.

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Battistini, Emiliano. 2018. ""Sealfie", "Phoque you" and "Animism": The Canadian Inuit Answer to the United-States Anti-sealing Activism." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 31 (3): 561-594. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9562-0.

ABSTRACT: A corpus made by online Canadian newspaper articles, coming from the archives of CBC News, Vice Canada and Huffington Post Canada, and related multimedia contents such us audio interviews, videos and especially links to images and comments shared on Twitter, allows us to reconstruct the debate on the seal hunt that involved Canadian media in 2014. In specific, we propose an interpretation of the pro-sealing discourse by Canadian Inuit and Newfoundlanders as an ironic and incisive answer to the serious United States animal rights activists discourse, explaining how these two different points of view on animals come from a different experience of the environment and a different conception of nature. The image of the seal became the friction point between Western naturalism against Inuit animism: a multinaturalist (Descola in Beyond nature and culture, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013) clash in the North America post-colonial situation. A clash solved by people as Tanya Tagaq and other Inuit artists that belong to these two different semiospheres (Lotman in Universe of the mind. A semiotic theory of culture. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1990) and thanks to their border placement can allow a dialog between Inuit and North American cultures traducing aesthetic forms, values and meanings. To study the structures of meaning at the base of this clash and iconoclash (Latour, in Weibel, Latour (eds) Iconoclash. Beyond the image-wars in science, religion and art, pp 14-37, ZKM and MIT Press, Boston, 2002) on the artic seal between opposite cultures, it has been necessary to use the socio-semiotic approach (Greimas and Court,s in Semiotics and language: an analytical dictionary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1982, Marrone in Corpi sociali. Processi comunicativi e semiotica del testo, Einaudi, Torino, 2001) with the help of semiotics of culture tools (Lotman in Universe of the mind. A semiotic theory of culture. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990, Culture and explosion. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2009].

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Belvisi, Francesco. 2014. "Legal Argumentation and Justice in Luhmann's System Theory of Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 27 (2): 341-357. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-014-9374-9.

ABSTRACT: The paper reconstructs Luhmann's conception of legal argumentation and justice especially focussing on the aspects of contingency and self-referring operative closure. The aim of his conception is to describe/explain in a disenchanted way-from an external, of "second order'' point of view-the work on adjudication, which, rather idealistically, lawyers and judges present as being a matter of reason. As a consequence of some surface similarities with Derrida's deconstructive philosophy of justice, Teubner proposes integrating the supposed reductive image of formal justice described by Luhmann with the ideal conception of justice presented by Derrida. Here this kind of attempt is rejected as epistemologically wrong. In addition, Luhmann's theory is argued to have other shortcomings, namely: the failure to understand the pragmatic function of principles, and the incapacity to describe the current legal questions linked with cultures and legal pluralism, which characterise our society.

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Benson, Robert W. 1989. "The semiotics of international law: Interpretation of the abm treaty." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 2 (3).

internal-pdf://3799058492/Benson-1989-The semiotics of international law.pdf.

Bhatia, Aditi, and Vijay K. Bhatia. 2011. "Discursive Illusions in Legislative Discourse: A Socio-Pragmatic Study." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 24 (1): 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9178-5.

ABSTRACT: This paper takes the position that interpretations of legal discourse are invariably taken in the context of socio-pragmatic realities to which a particular instance of discourse applies. What makes this process even more complicated is the fact that social realities themselves are often negotiated within the mould of one's subjective conceptualisations of reality. Institutions and organisations, including people in power, often represent socio-political realities from an ideologically fuelled perspective, engendering many 'illusory' categories often a result of contested versions of reality. To substantiate this view, we discuss interpretations of a number of interesting contemporary and controversial laws, including America's Patriot Act and Hong Kong's proposed Article 23 of the Basic Law. Both laws can be seen as illustrative of the definitional conflict that abstract concepts such as democracy and human rights are subjected to in their own specific socio-political contexts. While America crowns itself with democracy and Hong Kong struggles to achieve it in effective synthesis with its unique political arrangement, the laws produced by both contrasting political systems are unexpectedly similar, aiming for the moderation of basic rights. The actions of both governments set against their beliefs and discourses, and furthermore set against one another and other media voices, particularly those of non-governmental organisations, political activists, and other socio-political groups, demonstrate contestation of realities, giving rise to 'discursive illusions', which seem to be interpreted not so much on the basis of their linguistic construction but more on the basis of socio- pragmatic factors, such as trust, belief, transparency, control and power.

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Bich-Carriere, Laurence. 2019. "Say it with [A Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes]: Judicial Use and Legal Challenges with Emoji Interpretation in Canada." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 32 (2): 283-319. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9594-5.

ABSTRACT: Ah, emojis ?. Some enthusiastically speak of them as a new universal language. In 2015, the Oxford English dictionary crowned one of them as its word of the year. Sixty million are exchanged daily on Facebook. Along with emoticons and various other smileys, emojis are now part of daily communications. Visual add-ons or superscript, they are meant toindicate intent or add emotions to written messages, which do not benefit from the tone or body language of the interlocutor. As such, they present themselves as tools for clarification, but one can wonder if they do not, too, introduce uncertainty in language. Aimed at barristers as well as jurilinguists, this paper seeks to underline some design and perception biases that can hinder communication, with a focus on rules of evidence and legal methodology. Empirically rooted in Canadian case law, the findings resonate in other jurisdictions, as emojis, indeed, are a global phenomenon.

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Biel, Łucja. 2014. "Legal Translator as a Communicator." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 28 (1): 227-232. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-014-9385-6.

ABSTRACT: Review of Borja Albi, Anabel and Fernando Prieto Ramos (eds): Legal Translation in Context. Professional Issues and Prospects: Series New Trends in Translation Studies, 2013, Peter Lang, Oxford, Vol. 4, 315 pp

internal-pdf://2680154322/Biel-2014-Legal Translator as a Communicator.pdf.

Biel, Lucja. 2015. "Legal Translation in Context. Professional Issues and Prospects: Series New Trends in Translation Studies, vol 4." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 28 (1): 227-232. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-014-9385-6.

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Blesa, Juan J. Garcia. 2021. "Indeterminacy, Ideology and Legitimacy in International Investment Arbitration: Controlling International Private Networks of Legal Governance?" International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-021-09819-9.

ABSTRACT: This article connects the insights of post-realist scholarship about radical indeterminacy and its consequences for the legitimacy of adjudication to the current legitimacy crisis of the international investment regime. In the past few years, numerous studies have exposed serious shortcomings in investment law and arbitration including procedural problems and the substantive asymmetry of the rights protected. These criticisms have prompted a broad consensus in favor of amending the international investment regime and multiple reform proposals have appeared that appeal to the rule of law ideal as an instrument for increasing the acceptability of the international investment system. This article argues that the reliance of such proposals on jurisprudential approaches that fail to adequately accommodate the post-realist indeterminacy critique and take seriously the role of ideology in adjudication renders reform efforts unable to solve the legitimacy problems of the investment regime. The conclusions suggest the need to abandon implausible claims to depoliticization and face the methodological challenges posed by the promise of ideologically balanced assessments advanced by some rule of law theorists. The article finally points at the urgency to reform traditional approaches to doctrinal work in order to increase awareness of critical challenges and open up doctrinal methods to alternative methodological avenues.

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Bogoch, Bryna. 2013. "Audun Kjus: Stories at Trial, Translated from the Norwegian." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (2): 535-538. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9258-9.

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Bogucki, Olgierd. 2019. "The Derivational Theory of Legal Interpretation in Polish Legal Theory." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09628-1.

internal-pdf://2474737983/Bogucki-2019-The Derivational Theory of Legal.pdf.

Boshoff, Anel. 2013. "Law and Its Rhetoric of Violence." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (2): 425-437. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9277-6.

ABSTRACT: This article explores the manner in which politico-legal language makes use of metaphors of violence and destruction in order to describe state/legal functions and actions. It argues that although such use of a militaristic hyperbole is generally regarded as normal and appropriate, it is in fact harmful in the way that it presents complex and specific problems as being simple and abstract. From a semiotic point of view, and using the work of Roland Barthes, law is regarded as a system of signs and 'combative' legal language can be seen as ideological manipulation through the technique of so-called second-level signification (myth). Although it is conceded that law, similar to all other interpretive systems, cannot avoid the use of metaphoric language, it is argued that we should resist regarding legal language as neutral and 'natural' and that we should rather retain the memory of legal concepts and categories as historical, man-made, and therefore always open to revision.

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Brannan, James. 2013. "Coming to Terms with the Supranational: Translating for the European Court of Human Rights." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 26 (4): 909-925. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-013-9320-2.

ABSTRACT: Translators at the European Court of Human Rights, as at other inter- national courts, have to deal with two different types of legal terminology in judgments and decisions: on the one hand, terms that would be used by a national practitioner in the relevant language, and on the other, the supranational language that has evolved in general international law or that is specific to the Court itself, being enshrined in its basic texts or case-law. The choice of translation will often be imposed by the source text, which may be a constraint; extensive knowledge of the Court’s autonomous terms and other ‘‘linguistic precedent’’ is vital if they are to be used accurately and consistently. The task of devising and using supranational terms to encompass domestic realities in as many as 47 States is not only that of the drafter; the linguist also has a crucial role to play in conveying the Court’s message in a culture-neutral manner.

internal-pdf://3829175996/Brannan-2013-Coming to Terms with the Supranat.pdf.

Bremner, Stephen. 2011. "Academic Institutions as Corporate Enterprise: Transparency, Power and Control in Staff Appraisal." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 24 (2): 147-161. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9202-9.

ABSTRACT: Institutions of higher education, especially universities, have undergone a gradual transformation in the last 20 years or so under the pressures of account-ability-related measures such as the research assessment exercise, quality assurance procedures, outcomes-based teaching and learning, and the university rankings system. These measures have led academic institutions to adopt practices that emphasize corporate management concerns. Universities are no longer regarded as institutions of learning but more as corporate enterprise. One aspect of this transformation is also seen in the implementation of staff appraisal systems and promotion exercises, which are becoming increasingly formal and less transparent, often operating behind closed doors, and privileging increased power to decision-makers. There is a resulting danger of policies and procedures being designed, constructed, and interpreted to assign maximum control to decision-makers over the outcome of such processes. This paper presents analysis of a corpus of policies, rules, and procedures being used in a number of institutions of higher education, focusing on the issues of transparency, power and control in academic appraisals and promotions, to study the extent to which these rules and procedures are likely to make the exercise transparent and assign equitable power and control to the decision-makers as well as to the staff at the receiving end.

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Buffo, Angelo Pio. 2018. "Interpretation and Improvisation: The Judge and the Musician Between Text and Context." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 31 (2): 215-239. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9537-6.

ABSTRACT: This paper analyses the paradigms of interpretation and the evolution of the creative processes in music and law. Whether it is matter of a score or a law, the text is reborn through the work of the interpreter who, in dealing with the epistemological problem of the understanding, has to harmonize the purity of the philological reconstruction of the object with the need to actualize its sense. Moving from the creative character of every interpretation-neither the musician can be reduced to a mere executor of a concatenation of musical symbols on the staff as Stravinsky wanted nor the judge may be conceived as a bouche de la loi according to Montesquieu's theory-this work, after having discussed Gadamer and Betti's hermeneutical approaches to music and law, focuses on the issue of the limits to the interpreters' freedom. The interpretation here proposed revolves around improvisation, seen as a typical cultural practice of the aesthetic dimension of music. Improvisation, which from baroque to jazz does not correspond to the realm of absolute freedom, is used as a trait d'union in order to make a comparison with legal experience. This is particularly true with the development of case law, which becomes increasingly problematic especially in the light of "liquid modernity", where the "polytheism of values" has been gaining strength. Seen from this perspective, the comparison between the judge and the musician in their activity as interpreters of a formalized system of signs highlights the controversial relationship between form and creativity, the accuracy of the text and the requisites deriving from the social context, certainty and justice.

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Buksinski, Tadeusz. 2012. "The Struggle for the Legal Status of Religion in the Polish Constitution." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 25 (4): 577-583. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-011-9237-6.

ABSTRACT: The use of specific language in the democratic Polish Constitution enacted on 2 April 1997 has created the essential differences in the status of religions and Churches in Poland to this in some other countries. It accepts the modern principles and values (tolerance, freedom, mutual independence of state and churches) but precludes the atheistic, hostile or indifferent to religions interpretations and implementations of these values and principles.

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Cacciaguidi-Fahy, Sophie. 2006. "Creating Legal Space for the Unborn." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 19 (3): 275-292. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-006-9023-z.

ABSTRACT: This article explores how the unborn moved from inhabiting an implicit mother-centric space, tacitly expressed in the Irish constitutional order, to a separate legal space created first by the Eighth Amendment and later through public discourse, judicial interpretation and failed constitutional referenda. The article opens with a brief examination of the relationship between law and space in recent scholarly works. It goes on to assess the impact of post-colonial and gender discourse in producing the first legal space in which the unborn was tacitly understood. This is followed by an exploration of how cultural and gender rhetoric gave birth to a definite legal space in which the right to life for the unborn was protected by the Constitution and the government's subsequent attempts to solve the legal limbo by shifting the debate to the social policy space. The paper concludes by discussing the extent to which a wider, more universal space, that of human rights discourse, may have an impact on the legal space created for the unborn, by either protecting or weakening its right to life.

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Cacciaguidi-Fahy, Sophie, and Annabelle Mooney. 2009. "The Promise of Legal Semiotics." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 22 (4): 381-386. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-009-9123-7.

ABSTRACT: The aim of the 2008 Roundtable was to focus on the progress to date in the many facets-methodological, epistemological and conceptual-of the field of legal semiotics, specifically the contribution of different schools and forms of semiotics as well as emerging and emergent semiotics approaches which can be used in researching and interpreting law and legal phenomena. The participants sought primarily to engage with the epistemological and methodological challenges which the field currently faces and to discuss the implications of these.

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Cao, Deborah. 2019. "Desperately Seeking ‘Justice’ in Classical Chinese: On the Meanings of Yi." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 32 (1): 13-28. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9566-9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9566-9.

ABSTRACT: This essay sets out to search for an equivalent Chinese word to the English word ‘justice’ in classical Chinese language, through ancient Chinese philosophical texts, imperial codes and idioms. The study found that there does not seem to be a linguistic sign for ‘justice’ in classical Chinese, and further, yi resembles ‘justice’ in some ways and has been used sometimes to translate ‘justice’, but yi is a complex concept in traditional Chinese philosophy with multiple meanings and it is dissimilar to ‘justice’ in their semantic and pragmatic meanings in Chinese and English legal culture. While ‘justice’ is a keyword and fundamental to Western law, yi is not a legal word or concept in classical Chinese in traditional China. Given its complexity, yi does not have a one-to-one equivalent in English. It sometimes carries a sense of ‘righteousness’ and occasionally ‘justice’, but yi and ‘justice’ are not equivalent. In view of these, it becomes understandable that the translations of yi in contemporary Chinese usage vary ranging from ‘friendship and justice’ to ‘greater good’, among others. The meaning of yi is still uncertain and context sensitive as it was two thousand years ago.

internal-pdf://3194224735/Cao-2019-Desperately Seeking ‘Justice’ in Clas.pdf.

Carrino, Agostino. 2016. "Critical Considerations on the Constitution and Rights in Italian Contemporary Legal Culture." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 29 (4): 805-822. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9471-z.

ABSTRACT: In the following paper is put in question the present-day dominant Italian ideology of the so called 'new constitutionalism', which considers human rights as an open-texture catalogue of claims which only the Constitutional Courts (and more generally Justices) are entitled to interpret and implement. This ideology is considered as a tool for overcoming the traditional liberal rule of law (Rechtsstaat) in favor a of more and more developed rule of the courts (Richtersstaat).

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Charnock, Ross. 2010. "The Linguistics of Misrepresentation: Intentions and Truth Values." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 23 (4): 427-449. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9165-x.

ABSTRACT: During contractual negotiations, one party may lead the other into error, thus causing loss or damage. If misrepresentation is shown, the aggrieved party may therefore claim for damages or rescission. In the English law, it was for many years unclear whether a finding of misrepresentation required proof of deliberate, intentional fraud, or whether it could be analysed as a simple failure of consensus, in which case it would be sufficient to show negligence. According to the traditional rule, the mis- leading declaration had to be factually false, and concern an existing state of affairs or a verifiable past event. However, expressions of personal opinion or of future intention can mislead, although they cannot sensibly be considered as true or false. Further, in practice, many literally true sentences are liable to give false impressions. Such statements may be ambiguous or only partly true. Like linguists and ethical philoso- phers, the judges are confronted with recursive problems of understanding and re-interpretation. Citations from a number of celebrated English cases are given to show that in spite of significant developments, no legal rules or principles can satis- factorily account for intuitions concerning intentional behaviour and morality.

internal-pdf://3075096534/Charnock-2010-The Linguistics of Misrepresenta.pdf.

Cheng, Le. 2011. "Administration of Justice and Multimodality in Media: Semiotic Translation, Conflict and Compatibility." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 24 (4): 491-502. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9175-8.

ABSTRACT: Law as one sign system can be recorded and interpreted by another sign system-media. If each transaction in court is taken as a sign, it can be interpreted or transferred by different signs of media for the same purpose, though with different effects. This study focuses on the transformative effects of the semiotic revolution in media on law. The present research revealed that the evolution of media has driven the administration of justice to pay more attention to the process of court proceedings. This research also discusses the semiotic conflict and compatibility between the sign subsystems within media upon interpreting the administration of justice. In addition, disequilibrium between different sign systems highlights the consequent need for intersemiotic translation, consciousness and evaluation as part of decision making on court domains.

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Colapietro, Vincent. 2008. "Peircean Semeiotic and Legal Practices: Rudimentary and "Rhetorical'' Considerations." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 21 (3): 223-246. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-008-9065-5.

ABSTRACT: Too often C. S. Peirce's theory of signs is used simply as a classificatory scheme rather than primarily as a heuristic framework (that is, a framework designed and modified primarily for the purpose of goading and guiding inquiry in any field in which signifying processes or practices are present). Such deployment of his semeiotic betrays the letter no less than the spirit of Peirce's writings on signs. In this essay, the author accordingly presents Peirce's sign theory as a heuristic framework, attending to some of the most important ways that it might serve to facilitate a semeiotic investigation of our legal practices. He pays close attention to the ways the topics of history, formalism, reductionism, and generality become, from a Peircean perspective, salient features of legal studies.

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Condello, Angela. 2020. "Interpreting and Writing the Law in Digital Society: Remarks Made on a Shift of Paradigm." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (4): 1175-1186. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09733-6.

ABSTRACT: In this article I discuss the nature andsenseof legal reasoningasreasonableness, i.e. as judgement and equilibrium between normativity and factuality, and as constant approximation between these two dimensions. By (re)phrasing the intertwinement between legal hermeneutics and the nature and function of writing, the structure of the article is constructed so that the focus is on the changes currently occurring with the so-called 'digital revolution': in imagining a juridical system administrated through data analysis and algorithms, some contradictions emerge, especially concerning the nature, sense and task(s) of legal hermeneutics. The current shift of paradigm should be first of all addressed starting from thegrammatologicalnature of the revolution at stake. Only from this perspective can the shift be entirely grasped and, at the same time, only from this perspective can the methodological conundrum be deconstructed.

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Condello, Angela, Paolo Heritier, Massimo Leone, and Jenny Ponzo. 2020. "Special Issue "The Reasonable Interpreter. Perspectives on Legal and Non-Legal Semiotics". Introduction." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (4): 947-949. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09774-x.

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Curtis, Neal. 2019. "Black Panther's Rage: Sovereignty, the Exception and Radical Dissent." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 32 (2): 265-281. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9597-2.

ABSTRACT: Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler, became one of the highest grossing films of all time. It also received a lot of critical attention for its direct engagement with black experience and black politics. It speaks to the legacy of slavery and the exploitation of African-Americans and the ongoing post-colonial struggle represented most starkly by the Black Lives Matter Movement. However, the film was also criticised for supposedly leaving that radical black politics behind, even demonising it in its lead antagonist, Killmonger, and instead proposing a liberal, reformist agenda very much in keeping with current forms of sovereign power, bolstered under the current neoliberal regime by the charity of billionaires. To some extent this is understandable, but it is also a very limited reading of what happens in the film and does a disservice to the radical dissent that the character of Killmonger represents. To address this, the paper uses the concept of sovereignty and asks how superheroes can help us unpack this concept. It argues that rather than seeing superheroes as vigilantes, thinking of them as sovereigns helps us unpack the complex knot of law, authority and violence that is key to understanding it. In particular it draws on Agamben's discussion of sovereignty and the politics of the exception, and how this might be relevant to Fanon's work on counter-colonial violence to show how the film remains true to radical protest throughout. On the way it also addresses the important cultural politics of the original comic.

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de Carvalho, Evandro Menezes. 2007. "The Decisional Juridical Discourse of the Appellate Body of the WTO: Among Treaties and Dictionaries as Referents." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 20 (4): 327-352. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-007-9049-x.

ABSTRACT: This present paper is devoted to the analysis of the decisional juridical discourses of the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization. For this end, we decided to develop the research around two poles which shall be approached in an interweaving manner: the first concerns an examination of the methods of interpretation adopted by the Appellate Body and the second, which is a consequence of the former, devotes itself to the problem derived from the interpretation of authentic international treaties in more than one language. In the light of these two approaches we can verify that the interpretation of the Appellate Body is highly influenced by the search for the purpose of the text and the construction of the juridical discourse in question is made with reference to the linguistic system analyzed as a dictionary. It was established, that the Appellate Body carries out a dictionary interpretation with a tendency, even incipient, to consider the linguistic versions of the World Trade Organization Agreements. Finally, the task is structured having as a backdrop two interdependent concepts which should not be neglected in an analysis of international juridical discourses. They are the following: 'juridical culture' and 'language'. Both will be dealt with from a semiotic perspective since the central element of our study - and of the intersection between these two concepts - is the linguistic sign.

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de Munagorri, Rafael Encinas. 2012. "Contribution to the theory of jurisprudential interpretation. Labor law and the theory of law in the perspective of dialogism." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 25 (4): 585-592. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9194-5.

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de Ville, Jacques. 2008. "Derrida's The Purveyor of Truth and Constitutional Reading." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 21 (2): 117-137. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-008-9070-8.

ABSTRACT: In this article the author explores Jacques Derrida's reading in The Purveyor of Truth of Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter. In his essay, Derrida proposes a reading which differs markedly from the interpretation proposed by Lacan in his Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'. To appreciate Derrida's reading, which is not hermeneutic-semantic in nature like that of Lacan, it is necessary to look at the relation of Derrida's essay to his other texts on psychoanalysis, more specifically insofar as the Freudian death drive is concerned. The present article explores this 'notion' as elaborated on by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as well as Derrida's reading of this text. It also investigates the importance of the 'notion' of the death drive as well as the significance of Derrida's reading of The Purloined Letter for constitutional interpretation.

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de Ville, Jacques. 2010. "Revisiting Plato's Pharmacy." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 23 (3): 315-338. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9156-y.

ABSTRACT: In this essay, one of Derrida's early texts, Plato's pharmacy, is analysed in detail, more specifically in relation to its reflections on writing and its relation to law. This analysis takes place with reference to a number of Derrida's other texts, in particular those on Freud. It is especially Freud's texts on dream interpretation and on the dream-work which are of assistance in understanding the background to Derrida's analysis of writing in Plato's pharmacy. The essay shows the close relation between Derrida's analysis of Plato's texts and Freud's study of the dream-work. The forces at work in dreams, it appears, are at play in all texts, which in turn explains Derrida's contentions in relation to the pharmakon as providing the condition of possibility of Plato's texts. The essay furthermore points to the continuity between this 'early' text of Derrida and his 'later', seemingly more politico-legal texts of the 1990s. A close reading of Plato's pharmacy, with its investigation via 'writing' of the foundations of metaphysics, and thus also of the Western concept of law, is obligatory should one wish to comprehend how Derrida attempts to exceed the restricted economy of metaphysics through his analysis of concepts such as justice and hospitality.

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di Carlo, Giuseppina Scotto. 2013. "The Language of the UN: Vagueness in Security Council Resolutions Relating to the Second Gulf War." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (3): 693-706. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9262-0.

ABSTRACT: Over the last few years the diplomatic language of UN resolutions has repeatedly been questioned for the excessive presence of vagueness. The use of vague terms could be connected to the genre of diplomatic texts, as resolutions should be applicable to every international contingency and used to mitigate tensions between different legal cultures. However, excessive vagueness could also lead to biased or even strategically-motivated interpretations of resolutions, undermining their legal impact and triggering conflicts instead of diplomatic solutions. This study aims at investigating intentional vagueness in Security Council resolutions, by focussing on the analysis of the resolutions relating to the second Gulf war. Using the qualitative Discourse-Historical approach (Wodak in Rhetorics of racism and antisemitism, Taylor & Francis Ltd., London [2000]) and quantitative analysis tools (Antconc and Sketch Engine), special attention is given to the historical/political consequences of the vagueness and indeterminacy used in that framework and to the study of vague 'weasel words' (Mellinkoff in The language of the law, Little, Brown & Company, Boston [1963]), modals, and adjectives contained in the corpus. The hypothesis of intentional vagueness is further reinforced through an analysis of the US legislation related to the outbreak of the war, to reveal how the US has legally interpreted UN legislation and to understand the purposes and consequences of vague language contained in it. The findings indicate that vagueness in resolutions has triggered the Iraqi conflict instead of diplomatic solutions with the overall legislative intent of using intentional vagueness as a political strategy.

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di Carlo, Giuseppina Scotto. 2013. "Vagueness in Progress: A Linguistic and Legal Comparative Analysis Between UN and US Official Documents and Drafts Relating to the Second Gulf War." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (2): 487-507. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9293-6.

ABSTRACT: This paper is based on a doctoral thesis which aimed at investigating on whether the use of strategic vagueness in Security Council resolutions relating to Iraq has contributed to the breakout of the 2002-2003s Gulf war instead of a diplomatic solution of the controversies. This work contains a linguistic and legal comparative analysis between UN and U.S. documents and their drafts in order to demonstrate how vagueness was deliberately added to the final versions of the documents before being passed, and thus strategically used vagueness has played a crucial role in UN resolutions related to the outbreak of war in Iraq, and in relevant legislation produced by the United States for its Congressional authorisation for war. The comparative analysis between S/RES/1441(2002) and US legislation has evidenced that that there would have been diplomatic solutions to the Iraq crises which were not synonymous of light-handed intervention against Iraq, but deliberately vague UN wording allowed the US to build its own legislation with a personal interpretation implying that the UN did not impede military action.

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di Carlo, Giuseppina Scotto. 2015. ""Weasel Words'' in Legal and Diplomatic Discourse: Vague Nouns and Phrases in UN Resolutions Relating to the Second Gulf War." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 28 (3): 559-576. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9406-0.

ABSTRACT: This study aims at investigating vagueness in Security Council Resolutions by focussing on a selection of nouns and phrases used as the main casus belli for the Second Gulf War. Analysing a corpus of Security Council Resolutions relating to the conflict, the study leads a qualitative and quantitative analysis drawing upon Mellinkoff's (The language of the law. Little, Brown & Company, Boston, 1963) theories on "weasel words'', which are "words and expressions with a very flexible meaning, strictly dependent on context and interpretation''. Special attention is devoted to the historical/political consequences of such vague and indeterminate expressions. The findings indicate that excessive vagueness might have led to biased or even strategically-motivated interpretations of the Resolutions, triggering the Iraqi conflict instead of a diplomatic solution. The analysis of the "weasel words'' used in the Resolutions suggests the double-faced strength of such expressions: though they can guaranteed a wide degree of applicability of the Resolutions, their subjective interpretability might become a source of manipulation and elusiveness, with the overall legislative intent of using intentional vagueness as a political strategy.

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di Carlo, Giuseppina Scotto. 2017. "Linguistic Patterns of Modality in UN Resolutions: The Role of Shall, Should, and May in Security Council Resolutions Relating to the Second Gulf War." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (2): 223-244. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9488-3.

ABSTRACT: This paper will discuss the role of modality in UN Security Council resolutions. As a work in progress on whether the use of strategic vagueness in UN resolutions has contributed to the outbreak of the second Gulf war, this work proposes a qualitative and quantitative analysis on the role of vagueness of the central modal verbs shall, should, and may in the institutional language of the UN, drawing upon Wodak's Discourse-Historical Approach (Methods of critical discourse analysis. Sage Publications, London, 2001) and Jenkins (Modality in English syntax. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 1972), Gotti (Specialized discourse: linguistic features and changing conventions. Peter Lang, Bern, 2003), and Trosborg's (Rhetorical strategies in legal language: discourse analysis of statutes and contracts. Narr, Tubingen, 1997) theories on modality. Observing the semantic and linguistic values of these modals, the analysis investigates their double-faced strength: though they can be used to guarantee a wide degree of applicability of the resolutions, their subjective interpretability might become a source of manipulation and elusiveness, supporting a legislative intent of using vagueness as a political strategy.

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Dokoupilova, Despina. 2013. "Creating Legal Subjectivity Through Language and the Uses of the Legal Emblem: Children of Law and the Parenthood of the State." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (2): 315-339. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9260-2.

ABSTRACT: This paper constitutes a critical exploration of the functional features underpinning the unconscious of institutional attachment-namely an attachment which is understood in terms of the subject-infant's love for his institutional parent-power holder, and the indefinite need for a subject to remain within its infantile condition under the parenthood of the State. We venture beyond the Paternal metaphor and move towards the neglected metaphor of the Mother, so focal in the individual process of identification, assumption of language and the permanent attachment to the space of prohibition and Law. A new position in Language is defined. To understand how the psychic space of the infant is artfully subjugated in the making of the Western culture and domination of the Western system of legal interpretation, an enquiry into the legal emblematic history of representations is necessary to map the process through which the subject learns its legal self and relationship with otherness through what Pierre Legendre coined as the Occidental Mirror and the triangular logic of reflexivity. A final enquiry interrogates the way the legal institution places itself in the position of the specular image that captivates the subject-infant within a procreated legal order, a law-giving and law abiding life starting from the laws of the familial structure reinforced by the role of the parents and by analogy, by the State assuming that role in the institutional life of the ad infinitum infant.

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Dorato, Jimena Andino. 2013. "A Jurilinguistic Approach in Legal Education." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (3): 635-650. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9278-5.

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this essay is to advocate for including jurilinguistics in legal education. It presents jurilinguistics as a tool for understanding law and therefore supports continuing efforts to teach it. Knowing it is not unique, this essay proposes a jurilinguistic approach that focuses on the in-between of legal translation and comparative law. The proposal outlines the importance of educating in the capabilities of teaching a particular subject in a language other than their official one. The idea is to let the Other help to understand the Self. Particularly pertinent in transnational law programs, it is a multicultural approach that not only recognizes the other, but also embraces it.

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Du, Biyu. 2015. "The Silenced Interpreter: A Case Study of Language and Ideology in the Chinese Criminal Court." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 28 (3): 507-524. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9431-z.

internal-pdf://4087448012/Du-2015-The Silenced Interpreter_ A Case Study.pdf.

Du, Biyu. 2015. "The Silenced Interpreter: A Case Study of Language and Ideology in the Chinese Criminal Court." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 28 (3): 507-524. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9431-z.

ABSTRACT: Language-related right in the legal proceedings is mostly associated with access to interpreting. Literature on the bilingual courtroom primarily centres on the role of interpreters in the intercultural communication. This paper, drawing on discourse analysis of a case study in a Chinese criminal court, investigates the atypical role played by an interpreter when she ceases to be an active participant in the bilingual interaction. It discusses how language ideology underlying the judicial practice could transform the role of the interpreter and convert the bilingual arterial into a monolingual one. Situating the analysis in the wider social and legal context of Chinese criminal justice system, this paper attempts to explain and interpret the judicial behaviour to keep the interpreter silent and the impact on the language rights enjoyed by the minority-language-speaking defendants.

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Dullion, Valerie. 2015. "Comparative Law for Translators: From Theory to Didactics of Legal Translation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 28 (1): 91-106. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-014-9360-2.

ABSTRACT: Theorists of legal translation generally describe it as an interdisciplinary activity whose methodology draws deeply upon comparative law. In practice, how can we apply this theoretical paradigm to translator training? This article examines methods of integrating comparative law with the acquisition of knowledge and know-how that constitute the translator's core competences, emphasizing the resolution of legal terminology problems resulting from incongruencies between legal systems. Given that the goal is to compare law for the purposes of translation, it is useful to approach these problems from a functionalist viewpoint, principally through confronting a range of cases and situations likely to challenge the professional translator. Therefore, the author proposes including, along with other teaching methods, targeted work on terminological problems which necessitate the study of comparative law. A set of learning activities is presented for that purpose.

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Duncanson, Kirsty. 2011. "'We the People of the United States.': The Matrix and the Realisation of Constitutional Sovereignty." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 24 (4): 385-404. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9173-x.

ABSTRACT: In its enunciation of "We the people,'' the Constitution of the United States of America becomes a constitution of the flesh as it simultaneously invokes a constitution, a nation and a people. Correspondingly, its amendments as a list of rights pertaining to sex and race discrimination, and freedoms of bodily movement and action, assert the Constitution's authority through the evocation of "natural'' human bodies. In this article, I explore the way in which a sovereignty of the United States' Constitution is realised in the particularlised bodies of its citizens. The fundamental and foundational laws of the United States, and the narratives and myths used to interpret them, are in part rendered legitimate by the Constitution's embodiment, which extends from its physical manifestation in written documents into the flesh of its citizens. In order to make this argument, I turn to the film The Matrix (1999), the success of which relies on an investment in bodies and the United States' Constitution as matter through its interwoven narrative themes of human slavery and emancipation, reality and computer-generated simulation. At the same time, The Matrix extends its ideological play into the bodies of its audience, who experience the film's thrillingly sensorial fantasies of constitutional rights while enjoying its affective special effects. Thus, the sovereign authority of United States constitutional law is experienced as "natural'' through the phenomenological experience of cinema.

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Duxbury, N. 1990. "Political Desire of God - Study on Workings of the State and Law - French - Legendre,P." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 3 (7): 65-79. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01130270.

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Dyrda, Adam, and Tomasz Gizbert-Studnicki. 2020. "The Limits of Theoretical Disagreements in Jurisprudence." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09795-6.

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the "positivistic" idea of the limits of law in various contexts: the conceptual problem of the "limits of law", the limits of legal interpretation and the limits of theoretical disagreements in jurisprudence. In the latter case, we briefly show how contemporary "reflective" or "critical" positivist theories approach the possibility and limits of disagreements over the "grounds" of law. In what follows, we argue that these theories, which argue for a form of an "institutional" limit for admissible "legal" reasons as built upon theories of basic concepts or normative theories of interpretation, are themselves actually underdetermined by "legal culture" or, so to speak, a "folk theory of law". In the final section, we outline how a folk theory of law constrains both conceptual and interpretive enterprises in jurisprudence.

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El-Farahaty, Hanem. 2016. "Translating Lexical Legal Terms Between English and Arabic." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 29 (2): 473-493. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9460-2.

ABSTRACT: Legal translation between English and Arabic is under researched. However, the growing need for it, due to immigration and asylum seeking, among other reasons, necessitates the importance of more research. The asymmetry between English and Arabic poses many difficulties for legal translators, be they linguistic-based, culture-specific or system-based. The aim of this research is to discuss ways of translating lexical items between English and Arabic. In this current discussion I will present, exemplify and analyse the common difficult areas of translating English/Arabic legal texts and suggest ways of dealing with them. These areas involve culture-specific and system-based terms, archaic terms, specialised terms and doublets and triplets. With this aim in mind, the paper answers the following research questions: 1. What are the common difficulties of translating legal texts between English and Arabic? 2. What are the common lexical difficulties between English and Arabic legal texts? 3. What are the procedures of translating lexical legal terms between English and Arabic? The paper concludes that translating the above-mentioned lexical terms requires expertise, professional training, robust knowledge of the linguistic and legal systems of languages, as well as up-to-date electronic dictionaries and well-defined parallel corpora.

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Emily, Poon Wai Yee. 2005. "The Cultural Transfer in Legal Translation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 18 (3-4): 307-323. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-005-9004-7.

ABSTRACT: This paper will first explore legal translation from the semiotics approach. The sign developing process demands that in legal translation linguistic units cannot be exchanged in isolation from the legal cultural concepts. Some scholars equate legal equivalence with the extent to which the same legal effect can be produced in the target text. This paper will show the difficulties of achieving the same legal effect in the target text in view of the indeterminacy of word meaning in the source text, and will conclude from the analysis the best way of translating a legal text.

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Engberg, Jan. 2002. "Legal Meaning Assumptions. What are the consequences for legal interpretation and legal translation?" International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 15: 375-388. https://doi.org/http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/sela/2002/00000015/00000004/05102692.

ABSTRACT: In this article, I discuss similarities and differences between legal translators and legal interpreters. The discussion is centred around the impact that the choice of background assumptions as to meaning of linguistic items in legal texts has on the way lawyers and translators conceptualise their own work, respectively. The dispute between proponents of a strong and a weaker approach to legal meaning in legal interpretation is presented and the relations to legal translation is investigated. By way of conclusion I present some of the major consequences for legal translators of opting for the empirically more easily justifiable weaker approach.

internal-pdf://3829175994/Engberg-2002-Legal Meaning Assumptions. What a.pdf.

Engberg, Jan. 2020. "Comparative Law for Legal Translation: Through Multiple Perspectives to Multidimensional Knowledge." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 33 (2).

ABSTRACT: With this paper, I suggest a multiperspectivist approach for assessing conceptual legal knowledge with relevance for the translation of legal terms in translation between two or more different legal systems. The basic quest is to present a set of categories and analytical approaches for legal translators to generate (collect) and classify knowledge necessary for their professional conceptual needs. In this paper, I will focus on the translational, juridical, and cognitive basics of such an approach. In order to cope with the broad range of possible translational purposes in different translational situations and choose relevantly between alternative formulations, translators need methods and strategies in order to construct the necessary conceptual knowledge. This presupposes a broad knowledge structured in ways that enable the translator to recognize relevant characteristics of legal systems and relevant differences between different legal systems. Concerning translational theory, the basis is the functional theory of translation as adapted to legal translation, based upon the idea of translation as choice between alternatives and distinguishing between documentary translation, at one end of a scale, and instrumental translation, at the other. This basis and the distinction presuppose relevant knowledge from comparative law. Hence, existing approaches and fundamental tenets concerning comparative law inside and outside of translation are presented. In order for knowledge to be presented in a manageable way with relevance to translators, I work with the approach of concept frames as basic unit of knowledge gathering and categorization. This way of presenting knowledge is embedded more generally in a knowledge communication approach, focusing on knowledge asymmetry. Within this general framework, the multiperspectivist approach combines insights from cultural studies (especially the study of law-as-culture), law as a disciplinary social system, and communicative interaction generating meanings in legal communication, also across national borders.

internal-pdf://0661761027/02 Engberg.docx.

Engberg, Jan, and Kirsten Wølch Rasmussen. 2010. "Cognition, Meaning Making, and Legal Communication." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 23 (4): 367-371. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9161-1.

ABSTRACT: Many treatises on law, language and semiotics start out by stating correctly that law and language are deeply intertwined. The basic reason for the correctness of this statement is the fact that law as (fundamentally a system of) meaning is only accessible through (linguistic) signs and thus dependent on the process of interpreting the signs. One of the interesting things about the assertion of the entanglement of language and law, however, is that it may be held by scholars propagating logically oriented context-free approaches to legal argumentation (and thus to the relation between language and law) as well as by scholars propagating post-modern, constructivist and deconstructionist approaches. So stating the intertwined relation between language and law obviously does not say anything substantial about the conceptualisation by the utterer concerning this relation, as it is possible to subsume fairly different things under the concept of language. Therefore, in order to make sense of the statement that law and language are deeply intertwined it is important to assess what status language as a concept has for the holder of the argument in order to know, what the statement actually means.

internal-pdf://0719885025/Engberg-2010-Cognition, Meaning Making, and Le.pdf.

Erokhina, Yulia. 2020. "Semiotic Interpretation of the Sign 'Ecclesiastical Court' Within the Framework of Legal Precepts in Terms of Temporality and Spatiality (Case of Russia)." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09756-z.

ABSTRACT: The article aims to provide a semiotic interpretation of the sign of the Ecclesiastical Court within the legal framework from temporal and spatial perspectives (case of Russia). The starting point of the research is the idea that the history of the Russian Ecclesiastical Court is inextricably linked to the history of Russian society and secular court. Consideration of the pre-revolutionary ecclesiastical and secular law helps us explore principles of the ecclesiastical proceedings and organization, identify contradictions in understanding modern Ecclesiastical Court. Its sign is not only limited to the legal interpretation. In his novelThe Brothers Karamazov,Dostoevsky F. M. gave the sign of the Ecclesiastical Court symbolic meaning and, thus, expanded it beyond the existing legal framework. The Ecclesiastical Court is one of the symbols of Russian spirituality which is reflected in the concept of "Russian soul". Rational elements of the sign of Ecclesiastical Court as well as its sensual and metaphorical (represented visually in the author's pictures in this article) components, are analyzed using the category of Truth. Clearly, the Cross is sign-symbol for Christianity. But if applied to the concept of Ecclesiastical Court, the Orthodox Cross becomes a sign-index. As a result, several semantically heterogeneous meanings of the sign of Ecclesiastical Court are revealed and described.

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Etxabe, Julen. 2019. "The Art of Judicial Reasoning: Festchrift in Honor of Carl Baudenbacher." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 32 (3): 759-764. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09625-4.

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Feldman, Daniel L. 2021. "Should Judges Justify Recourse to Broader Contexts When Interpreting Statutes?" International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 34 (2): 377-388. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09696-8.

ABSTRACT: Courts purport to abandon ordinary meaning only when words in a statute accommodate more than one meaning; to look to surrounding words, legislative history, and then public policy considerations, only if those previous efforts fail. The canon of statutory construction, "a word is known by its associates," generally meansnearestassociates, or near as possible. An analogous language philosophy principle counsels increasing search radius only as needed. Dimensional extension advances the sequence to broader domains of information. Such incrementalist restrictions should require consistent justification of each broadening step by the inadequacy of preceding steps. But courts don't do this, and shouldn't. This essay references the legal debate between "textualists" and non-textualists and its philosophical parallel between minimalists and pragmatists. It illustrates court departures from the incrementalist model, and concludes that when judges choose broad evidentiary contexts in seeking statutory meaning, they need no more justification than when they choose narrower ones.

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Fikfak, Veronika, and Benedict Burnett. 2009. "Domestic Courts' Reading of International Norms: A Semiotic Analysis." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 22 (4): 437-450. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-009-9125-5.

ABSTRACT: This article focuses on a number of cases in international law in which US domestic courts have produced judgments that conflict with those given by the International Court of Justice. The nature of these courts' judgments has been extremely closely tied to the interpretation given by the US national Executive to a certain international norm. This situation raises a number of questions, which can be broadly categorized into two spheres: the legal (regarding the overall legality of the courts' decisions) and the semiotic (regarding the manner in which a 'meaning' for the norm has been claimed by the courts). In this article we aim to provide answers to a number of these questions, both from the standpoint of international law and from that of a reader-response model of semiosis. We also analyse the level of interdependency that exists between the two spheres.

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Floter-Durr, Margarete, and Paulina Nowak-Korcz. 2020. "La notion de tiers-espace et la traduction juridique : quelle articulation ?" International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09783-w.

ABSTRACT: In recent years, we have noticed in many research areas a growing interest in the translation paradigm. In this article we discuss the theory of "cultural translation", developed by Homi Bhabha in the context of postcolonial studies, and his concept of "Third Space" (2007). This theory aims to describe the different processes at play in the creation of identity within a space in which several cultures coexist. According to Bhabha, "the Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistorised and read anew". In this article, we aim to examine to what extent this theory can be applied to translation, especially to legal translation. The concepts of "Third Space" and hybridity developed by Bhabha undoubtedly have a certain appeal for the translator. However, from the methodological point of view other approaches seem to allow for a better understanding of the translation aspects raised by Bhabha in his theory. We therefore provide an interesting analysis of the "Third Space" based on the concept ofintervalby Cassin (eloge de la traduction. Compliquer l'universel, Fayard, Paris, 2016), which is defined as a complex zone of interactions and interferences. This analysis is completed by examining the concept of frontiers by Moreteau (Revue internationale de droit compare 4(61):695-713, 2009. DOI: 10.3406/ridc.2009.19911) which is implicitly present in the concept ofinterval. In order to analyse the concept of hybridity, the methodological framework of transdifference developed by Srubar (Kultur und Semantik, VS Verlag fur Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden, 2009) can also be used.

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Foldi, Andras. 2020. ""False Friends" and Some Other Phenomena Reflecting the Historical Determination of the Terminology of Hungarian Private Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (3): 729-747. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09727-4.

ABSTRACT: This article deals with some phenomena of the Hungarian legal language from a historical point of view, with special regard to the terminology of private law going back to Roman law tradition. The author aims, on the one hand, to present the historical background of the current terminology of Hungarian private law by means of some representative examples. On the other hand, it is attempted at demonstrating that "false friends" and some further misunderstandings in the current terminology of Hungarian private law can be led back to the historical determination of the concepts/terms in question. A certain Hungarian legal language existed already in the 16th c., however it reached the common European level by the middle of the 19th c. This development took place mainly under the influence of the Austrian and German law and legal science. Due to the translation of foreign legal terms to Hungarian since the 19th c. there emerged some "global" difficulties of legal terminology also in the Hungarian legal language. As the most important example, the reception ofbona fidescan be mentioned. It was an amendment of the Hungarian Civil Code in 2006 which tried to eliminate the misunderstandings as regards the principle of good faith (and fair dealing) conceived formerly by many Hungarian jurists exclusively in subjective sense. The history of reception of the German notions ofGultigkeitandWirksamkeitin Hungary is extremely intriguing, too. Hungarian jurists did not follow the pattern of the German BGB but developed this pair created by Windscheid by drawing a clear distinction between the validity and effectiveness of legal transactions (as well as of the legal norms), similar to the Italian terminology (validitav.efficacia). Sometimes the reception of German notions happened in a less successful way (e.g. in the case ofnegatives Interessecreated by Jhering, which can be qualified as a "false friend" in Hungary in comparison with the original German notion). Despite the important foreign, especially German impacts, the Hungarian legal language is an autonomous one having several remarkable features which deserve attention also in comparison with terminology of the Western legal cultures.

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Frade, Celina. 2015. "Legal Translation in Brazil: An Entextualization Approach." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 28 (1): 107-124. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-014-9357-x.

ABSTRACT: Recent trends in academic and professional legal communication worldwide have promoted significant changes to aim at operating successfully under current multilingual and multilegal contexts. The aim is to consider a kind of supranational legal discourse so as to minimize socio-cultural variants and to pro- mote the pragmatic conditions for harmonized and ‘common sense’ legal practices without excluding potential reciprocal influences of or resistance to one hegemonic legal system upon others. In Brazil, the traditional ‘thinking like a civil lawyer’ culture still prevails against a more global approach constraining the consolidation of the country’s role of major player in most global legal areas. In addition, the key tool required for achieving some sort of global legal status—Brazilian legal oper- ators’ proficiency in legal English—has been barely considered in both academic and professional settings, particularly in legal translation. This study resorts to the linguistic anthropology concept of ‘entextualization’ (Bauman and Briggs in Ann Rev Anthropol 19:59–88, 1990 and others) to discuss the process of official (or sworn) translation in Brazil to render (or not) global legal genres. The comparative analysis between the original text in English and its official version in English focus on drafting consistency, the translator’s choice of some formal entextualization elements used in the process of translation and his/her authority as the entextual- izing agent to legitimate text.

internal-pdf://2953234335/Frade-2015-Legal Translation in Brazil_ An Ent.pdf.

Fuglinszky, Adam, and Reka Somssich. 2020. "Language-bound terms-term-bound languages: the difficulties of translating a national civil code into a lingua franca." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (3): 749-770. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09704-x.

ABSTRACT: The present paper-taking the example of the English translation of the Hungarian Civil Code of 2013-aims to give an overview on the legal and terminology-related challenges and pitfalls that might occur during the process of translating a civil code with civil law traditions into the language of the common law world. An attempt is made to categorise terminology-related conceptual problems and elaborate how the different types of translation methods (functional equivalence, paraphrasing and neologism) could be applied; moreover, how a kind of legal-linguistic checks-and-balances can be achieved through the well-dosed combination, having also the ratio of similarities to differences (SD-ratio or SD-relationship) of legal concepts behind the respective terms in mind. Legal translators must act beyond the role of a simple translator: they must be comparatists, being aware of the legal origin of the relevant concepts and using the methods of comparative private law and translation studies at the same time, since both law and language are system-bound and are heavily influenced by the cultural and social environment. The authors strive to identify the significance of those problems (and possible solutions) from the perspective of how language-related aspects can perform some fine-tuning on the comparative methodology and findings, whether they are barriers only or provide also an opportunity to verify or refute prima facie comparative results. Comparative law-no doubt-supports legal translation, but their relationship is reciprocal: legal-linguistic subjects and problems emerging in the course of legal translation supply valuable feedback and further sources of inspiration.

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Galuskina, Ksenia. 2019. "Translations of legal discourse: Historical perspectives." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 32 (1): 225-228. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09608-5.

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Gaudencio, Ana Margarida Simoes. 2020. "Rationality and/as Reasonableness Within Formal-Theoretical and Practical-Dialectical Approaches to Adjudication: Semiotic and Normative Perspectives." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (4): 1033-1041. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09755-0.

ABSTRACT: Rationalityandreasonablenesscan be illustrated as Janus-faced concepts, not only in a descriptive diagnosis but also in a normative construction of adjudication, and in the analysis of its practical and rhetorical effects. Considering such an illustration, the present reflection returns to the discussion on the relevance ofrationalityandreasonablenessin legal interpretation, aiming at distinguishing and/or connecting principles and criteria, beyond formally logical and/or procedurally argumentative decision-making, and, thus, within a normatively practical adjudication. Such an approach will be presented in two main steps. In a first step, therationality/reasonablenessdichotomy will be discussed within a constitutive connection between principles and criteria in adjudication, and understanding legal principles as normatively substantial foundations to legal criteria-the former as axiological references filtered into the juridical system and the latter as their concretizations, and whose practical adequacy is rhetorically assigned by theinterpretive communitiesinvolved in/by adjudication, and normatively referred both to their practical accordance to the axiological normativity of the principles they shall presuppose and to their suitability as practical operators to the problematic relevance of thesub judicecases. In a second step, and consequently, encompassing the projection of legal interpretation, in semiotic and in practical-normative perspectives, in order to discuss their constituting practical relevance in adjudication, therationality/reasonablenessdichotomy will be experimented within formal-logical procedures and within practical-dialectical connections between juridical problem and juridical system-therefore stating a discussion on the foundations, the intentionality and the consequences of adjudication, amongst (theoretical-formal)deductionand (practical-dialectical)analogy.

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Gemar, Jean-Claude. 2008. "Form and meaning of the legal message in translation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 21 (4): 323-335. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-008-9085-1.

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Gemar, Jean-Claude. 2016. "Dictionary of the Civil Code, 663." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 29 (2): 495-501. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9462-0.

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Gémar, Jean-Claude. 2018. "L’analyse comparée en traduction juridique, ses enjeux, sa nécessité." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 31 (4): 957-975. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9592-7.

ABSTRACT: Translated texts sometimes reflect the writing tradition of the targeted law, but the equivalence of the source legal message, however, must be delivered in the target text. Translating law into a different legal culture cannot be accomplished without comparing laws, whose knowledge is essential to achieving legal equivalence. The way the target text is written should match its culture. Translating law is the moment when languages, cultures and laws meet. To materialize, this encounter has to be based on an ad hoc knowledge of the laws at stake. Then comparative law, transla- tors’ “fellow traveler”, comes into play, preparing them for the exchange. To achieve this, “one only needs two receptions which intersect” (Carbonnier). This move is successful when concepts and notions overlap and the letter of law (substance) and its wording (form) merge, revealing “the spirit of the laws”. Comparative analysis is the way to achieve this result (I). It is conducted here under the light of jurilin- guistics with an analysis of terms and concepts presenting various translation dif- ficulties, demonstrating the necessity of comparative law (II). The lessons to be learned are aimed at all language professionals wishing to draw inspiration from the jurilinguists’comparative analysis approach to their work.

internal-pdf://4146382219/Gémar-2018-L’analyse comparée en traduction ju.pdf.

Gemar, Jean-Claude. 2018. "Comparative analysis in legal translation, its challenges, its necessity." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 31 (4): 957-975. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9592-7.

ABSTRACT: Translated texts sometimes reflect the writing tradition of the targeted law, but the equivalence of the source legal message, however, must be delivered in the target text. Translating law into a different legal culture cannot be accomplished without comparing laws, whose knowledge is essential to achieving legal equivalence. The way the target text is written should match its culture. Translating law is the moment when languages, cultures and laws meet. To materialize, this encounter has to be based on an ad hoc knowledge of the laws at stake. Then comparative law, translators' fellow traveler, comes into play, preparing them for the exchange. To achieve this, one only needs two receptions which intersect (Carbonnier). This move is successful when concepts and notions overlap and the letter of law (substance) and its wording (form) merge, revealing the spirit of the laws. Comparative analysis is the way to achieve this result (I). It is conducted here under the light of jurilinguistics with an analysis of terms and concepts presenting various translation difficulties, demonstrating the necessity of comparative law (II). The lessons to be learned are aimed at all language professionals wishing to draw inspiration from the jurilinguists'comparative analysis approach to their work. ResumeLe texte traduit reflete parfois la tradition d'ecriture du droit vise, mais l'equivalence du message juridique, elle, doit etre realisee. La traduction du droit vers une culture juridique differente ne peut se faire sans une comparaison des droits, dont la connaissance est requise pour realiser l'equivalence juridique. La forme linguistique du texte cible doit neanmoins correspondre a sa culture. La traduction juridique est alors le point de rencontre entre langues, cultures et droits. Pour advenir, cette rencontre doit reposer sur une connaissance ad hoc des droits en presence. Entre alors en jeu le droit compare, << compagnon de route >> du traducteur, qu'il prepare a l'echange. Pour le realiser, << il suffit de deux receptions qui s'entrecroisent >> (Carbonnier). Cette operation connait le succeslorsque concepts et notions se recoupent et que la lettre du droit (le fond) et son expression (la forme) se fondent, illustrant << l'esprit des lois >>. L'analyse comparative est le moyen d'atteindre ce resultat (I). Elle est conduite ici sous l'eclairage de la jurilinguistique par l'analyse de termes et notions presentant diverses difficultes de traduction, demontrant la necessite du droit compare (II). Les lecons a en tirer s'adressent aux langagiers desireux de s'inspirer de la methode d'analyse comparative de la jurilinguistique dans leurs travaux.

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Gemar, Jean-Claude. 2019. "Institutional Translation for International Governance." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 32 (1): 215-223. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09603-w.

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Gémar, Jean Claude. 2008. "Forme et sens du message juridique en traduction." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 21 (4): 323-335.

ABSTRACT: Latent in the text, the meaning waits to be revealed by the interpretation. When it comes to translation, the difficulty presented by the translation of some legal texts rsults mainly from the normative character of those texts and their conceptual density. The older and more complex the society, the more complex its institutions and language will be. Each term testified to the complexity. The message shapes interpertation. The style is however not negligeable. The manner of saying carries x possible meanings. It influences the meaning and its perception, sometimes modifies its course and the interpretation that the translator or the jurilinguist -even the jurist- may make of it. In suspension until its final interpretertation by the courts, the meaning of the text is then fixed. In this perspective, according to Gadamer, the translator is well placed to distinguish the forms when interpreting the message of the text in order to translate it.

internal-pdf://3516616451/Gémar-2008-Forme et sens du message juridique.pdf.

Gizbert-Studnicki, Tomasz, and Mateusz Klinowski. 2012. "Are Legal Concepts Embedded in Legal Norms?" International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 25 (4): 553-562. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-011-9238-5.

ABSTRACT: In this paper, we discuss the problem of the relationship between legal concepts and legal norms. We argue that one of the widespread theories of legal concepts, which we call 'the embedding theory', is false. The theory is based on the assumption that legal norms are central for any legal system and that each legal norm establishes an inferential link between a certain class of facts and a certain class of legal consequences. Alf Ross's embedding theory was presented in his famous paper "Tu-Tu''. According to Ross, the sole function of legal concepts is to simplify normative information. Hence, the use of legal concepts may be a matter of convenience, rather than necessity. We criticize this approach mainly by pointing to the existence of so-called second order substantive concepts, which are not reducible to any determined set of conditional sentences (inferential links). In short, second order substantive concepts play the role of general standards, and general standards are used to provide flexibility for a particular legal system. In addition, general standards are 'value loaded', since they serve as a frame of reference for judges applying law to particular cases. To understand such general standards as a predefined set of conditionals means to overlook their 'open' content, and thus their function. In our opinion, the acceptance of the embedding theory means to misinterpret the function of general standards. We also argue that Giovani Sartor's idea of defective legal concepts doesn't help to clarify or defend the embedding theory.

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Glanert, Simone. 2015. "Instead of a common language, a common speech? The case of the European Union." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 28 (1): 73-90. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-014-9372-y.

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Goltzberg, Stefan. 2008. "Sketch of typology of legal argumentation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 21 (4): 363-375. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-008-9088-y.

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Greciano, Philippe. 2016. "European Union Law and Linguistic Mediation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 29 (3): 511-523. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9435-8.

ABSTRACT: The Law of the European Union is multilingual and multijural. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the problems related to the use of several languages in the writing of European legal texts and to compare the interactions between law and language in the decision-making process at the executive and judicial levels. Finally, the study will focus on the contributions of translation as a linguistic mediation in the communication of the European message on the continent.

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Halimi, Sonia Asmahène. 2019. "Rethinking the English–Arabic Legal Translation Course: Restructuring for Specific Competence Acquisition." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 32 (1): 117-134. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9568-7. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9568-7.

ABSTRACT: The standards for translating texts in specialized fields have become particularly rigorous with the increasing complexity of material and growing demand for its translation. While translations simply aimed at communication and produced by machine translation are proliferating, the need for reliable and high-quality translations is also increasing. The demand for expert-dependable legal translation is higher than ever, requiring competence-based training in the field of legal translation. This paper describes a guided-task framework for developing subject area competence at the earliest stage of an English–Arabic legal translation course. It presents the three most problematic phases of concept processing in legal translation in terms of: (a) legal systems; (b) branches of law; and (c) genre-based phraseology. The approach presented below is part of a more general study that aims to describe the first course in a series of three graduate courses on legal translation, each of them motivated by a guided-task framework that has the aim of developing three specific competences in legal translation: (a) legal concept processing => subject area competence; (b) documentary research => instrumental competence; and (c) legal rhetorics => communicative and textual competence. In this paper we intend to focus on the first course of legal concept processing as a key prerequisite for legal knowledge development. We illustrate the relevance of addressing specific variables (legal systems, branches of law and genre-based phraseology) when analysing legal concepts in the text that is to be translated, before proceeding to the information search and communication, according to established formulae and conventions.

internal-pdf://1682085144/Halimi-2019-Rethinking the English–Arabic Lega.pdf.

Halimi, Sonia Asmahene. 2019. "Rethinking the English-Arabic Legal Translation Course: Restructuring for Specific Competence Acquisition." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 32 (1): 117-134. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9568-7.

ABSTRACT: The standards for translating texts in specialized fields have become particularly rigorous with the increasing complexity of material and growing demand for its translation. While translations simply aimed at communication and produced by machine translation are proliferating, the need for reliable and high-quality translations is also increasing. The demand for expert-dependable legal translation is higher than ever, requiring competence-based training in the field of legal translation. This paper describes a guided-task framework for developing subject area competence at the earliest stage of an English-Arabic legal translation course. It presents the three most problematic phases of concept processing in legal translation in terms of: (a) legal systems; (b) branches of law; and (c) genre-based phraseology. The approach presented below is part of a more general study that aims to describe the first course in a series of three graduate courses on legal translation, each of them motivated by a guided-task framework that has the aim of developing three specific competences in legal translation: (a) legal concept processing=>subject area competence; (b) documentary research=>instrumental competence; and (c) legal rhetorics=>communicative and textual competence. In this paper we intend to focus on the first course of legal concept processing as a key prerequisite for legal knowledge development. We illustrate the relevance of addressing specific variables (legal systems, branches of law and genre-based phraseology) when analysing legal concepts in the text that is to be translated, before proceeding to the information search and communication, according to established formulae and conventions.

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Hanny, Courtney. 2016. "Imagining New Social Legal Futures: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Pre-Law Students' Experiences with Discourse Communities of Legal Practice." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 29 (1): 87-120. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9438-5.

ABSTRACT: This paper considers the ways that concepts such as social justice and law were used as semiotic objects-in-tension by a group of five US undergraduates considering law school to make sense of their ideas about entering the discourse communities and communities of practice associated with being a lawyer. This group was made up of undergraduate women who had completed a summer residency program sponsored by the Law School Admissions Council to increase enrollment of students from under-represented groups. Of the five participants, two were US-born; the others immigrated to the US as teenagers; each was aware of her position as multiply marginalized, by gender as well as other factors, including refugee or immigrant status, religious affiliation, sexual identity, and/or association with "at risk" labeling. Data analyzed reflect a 3-year study of their changing perceptions of their relationships to law school discourse communities, using text, interviews, individual video narratives, and informal, face-to-face group meetings. A sociolinguistic approach to multimodal discourse analysis is used to examine the ways that the women, each in a unique way, articulated an increased investment in direct and embodied engagement, lived experience, and personal testimony-not as supplements to doing/being a lawyer, but as necessary and expected practices therein. Over time and through various modalities, they used their vantage point from outside the dominant discourse communities of law to stage social critique and to contest the binary logic and normative criteria that forge the boundaries of exclusion from and inclusion in these communities. Specifically, they resemiotized notions of being a lawyer from the margins in ways that demanded a more fluid and polysemous interpretation of what it means to do ethically rigorous social justice work-hence reworking the relationships between justice (as an abstract ideal) and the law (as an institutionalized regime) and widening the semiotic potential of their own future work. Particularly significant are the ways that semiotic trajectories progressed from an emphasis on what Halliday identifies as textual (fixed and highly abstract) functions of language to interpersonal (embodied, relational) and ideational (expressive, experiential) functions. Such a trajectory away from entextualization suggests that voices and perspectives from the margins may be using those imaginary margins tactically as sites from which to contest the boundaries that define whose voices count within the legal system and to contest normative limits on semiotic potentialities for lawyers working toward more just social futures.

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Hardie-Bick, James. 2020. "Mass Violence and the Continuum of Destruction: A study of C. P. Taylor's Good." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (2): 477-495. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09718-5.

ABSTRACT: There are important studies that have directly focused on how, in times of conflict, it is possible for previously law abiding people to commit the most atrocious acts of cruelty and violence. The work of Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom), Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem), Zygmunt Bauman (Modernity and the Holocaust) and Ernest Becker (Escape from Evil) have all contemplated the driving force of aggression and mass violence to further our understanding of how people are capable of engaging in extreme forms of cruelty and violence. This paper specifically addresses these issues by focusing on C. P. Taylor's play Good. This provocative play examines how a seemingly 'good' and intelligent university professor can gradually become caught up in the workings of the Third Reich. Taylor highlights the importance of appreciating how people can be steadily incorporated into an ideologically destructive system. I argue that the theatre is a powerful medium to explore these complex issues. The audience of Good find themselves confronted with the following question-'What would you have done?'

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Harvey, Ramon. 2016. "The Preferences of al-Kis(a)over-bar'I (d. 189/805): Grammar and Meaning in a Canonical Reading of the Qur'an." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 29 (2): 313-332. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9463-z.

ABSTRACT: The Qur'an has been transmitted as both a written text and an oral recital. This has led to the development of a reading tradition that permits numerous different vocalisations to be made upon the basic skeletal text of the established 'Uthm (a) over barn (i) over bar codex. Ibn al-Jazar (i) over bar (d. 833/1429) chose ten early readers whom he felt were most representative of this tradition and whose readings are treated as canonical up until this day. One of these, the Kufan linguist al-Kis (a) over bar'(i) over bar 's (d. 189/805) has been characterised in the literature as more focused on the grammar of the Quran than his reader peers. This article explores al-Kis (a) over bar'(i) over bar 's process of ikhtiyar (preference) when deciding between various possible readings. The sample for analysis consists of Kis (a) over bar'(i) over bars tafarrud (a) over bart, the approximately fifty cases in which his reading differs from the other nine readers. By comparing his reading with the comments of early scholars of Quran than his reader peers. This article explores al-Kisa'is process of ikhtiyar (preference) when deciding between various possible readings. The sample for analysis consists of Kisa'is tafarrudat, the approximately fifty cases in which his reading differs from the other nine readers. By comparing his reading with the comments of early scholars of Quranic linguistics, especially his near-contemporary al-Farr (a) over bar' (d. 208/822), it is possible to construct a typology of the suspected principal reasons for al-Kis (a) over bar'(i) over bar 's tafarrud (a) over bart. Not only are many of these based on grammatical preferences, but they demonstrate a significant degree of consistency. Furthermore, analysis of a cluster of readings with implications for the interpretation of the shar (i) over bar 'a (divine law and moral code) provides evidence for a subtle exegetical dimension to al-Kis (a) over bar'(i) over bars work as a reader-grammarian.

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Heritier, Paolo. 2020. "Vico's "Scienza Nuova": Sematology and Thirdness in the Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (4): 1125-1142. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09768-9.

ABSTRACT: Is it the task of legal semiotics or the legal philosophers to define legal semiotics? For the philosopher of law, the question recalls the distinction between philosophers' philosophy of law and legal scholars' philosophy of law. The thesis that the paper argues is that a semiotic legal perspective can also be sought from the analysis of anthropological knowledge on the origin of the social bond and society, implying a social and institutional theory of the mind. In the first paragraph, the search for a different kind of rationality emerges from a semiotician, Jurgen Trabant, who analyses semiotically the thought of a rhetorician and philosopher of law, Giambattista Vico. In the second paragraph, the anthropological notion of social bond emerges from the debate on the relationship between the idea of the gift and that of exchange. In the third paragraph, the analysis of the legal notion of thirdness recognizes the central role of myth and fiction in the configuration of the civil world and sign, returning to Vico's critical view of the philosophy of language as an institution of society.

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Hickey, Leo. 1993. "Presupposition Under Cross-Examination." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 6: 89-109.

internal-pdf://3172685407/Hickey-1993-Presupposition Under Cross-Examina.pdf.

Higgins, Noelle. 2020. "Songlines and Land Claims; Space and Place." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09748-z.

ABSTRACT: The Songlines of the Indigenous peoples of the country now called Australia are an invisible web of pathways which trace the journeys of ancestral spirits as they created the earth, seas, creatures and plants. They contain information about the land, encoding the locations of resources across the landscape throughout the seasons, and mapping sacred spaces and notable places. In addition, Songlines have also been of central significance in claims concerning title to land, taken under both the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976 and the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) (Commonwealth Native Title Act, 1993). Songlines have been 'translated' and 'interpreted' by experts, including historians and anthropologists, for use in land claims under the common law and have been recognised as symbols of land ownership. This article provides a discussion of the Songlines, discusses their status in the legal system of Australia as evidence of title to land, and analyses the role of experts in decoding Songlines in legal proceedings.

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Hobson, Marian. 2010. "Laws and Universality, Laws and History." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 23 (3): 265-281. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9153-1.

ABSTRACT: The article begins by examining two arguments used by Derrida in work published in 1967. The first claims against Le'vi-Strauss that an empirical pattern of events cannot be injected into or superimposed onto an historical pattern claiming universality, for then there can be no disconfirmation of what is said. (This argument is used against Marxian history by some who write in the wake of Existentialism, Paul Roubiczek for instance.) The second claims against Foucault that he does not distinguish between reason as part of thinking and language and reason as an empirical historical structure capable of modification along time. The article then discusses the use of very similar if not identical arguments in Derrida's much more recent work on laws, Force of law. The intelligibility, the interpretability, of laws and their history comes after the laws, not before, and is thus not fully universalisable.

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Hu, Lung-Lung. 2020. "Justification and Opposition of Mass Killing: Black Sun-The Nanking Massacre." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09791-w.

ABSTRACT: Japan was supposed to obey the law during the second world war. However, the Nanjing Massacre still happened. Hirohito, the Japanese emperor, deliberately avoided mentioning the International Treaties in the imperial rescript of the Great East Asia War in 1937. The Nanking Massacre was carried out according to the Japanese army's interpretation of the imperial rescript. Such a legal interpretation was rooted in the idea that Japan had to educate the Chinese and transform China by killing its people in order to pursue a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere led by Japan. In the filmBlack Sun: The Nanking Massacre(1995), we can see both a justification of and an opposition to killing. In this paper I am going to show how the imperial rescript is used to justify this mass killing is and how opposing arguments are used to show its cruelty and absurdity, which is taken as a means to achieve a greater good.

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Husa, Jaakko. 2016. "Translating legal language and Comparative Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 30 (2): 261-272. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9490-9.

internal-pdf://3616831459/Husa-2016-Translating Legal Language and Compa.pdf.

Hutchings, Peter J. 1999. "Interpreting the Rule of Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 12: 445-461.

internal-pdf://3289099612/Hutchings-1999-Interpreting the Rule of Law.pdf.

Hutton, Christopher. 2009. "Meaning, Time and the Law: Ex Post and Ex Ante Perspectives." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 22 (3): 279-292. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-009-9113-9.

ABSTRACT: This paper considers the tension between timelessness and timeboundedness in legal interpretation, examining parallels between sacred texts and secular law. It is argued that familiar dualities such as those between statute and judge-made law, law and equity, written and spoken discourse, dictionary meaning versus intended or contextual meaning, can be examined using this timeless/timebounded framework. Two landmark English cases, DPP v Shaw (1961) and R v R (1991) are analyzed as illustrating contrasting aspects of the socio-legal politics of "reasoning backwards''. The related temporal distinction between ex ante and ex post points of view is examined both within legal theory and as a key issue for linguistic and semiotic systems. The argument is made that this distinction is the key to a wide range of methodological and theoretical problems in relating linguistics and semiotics to law.

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Isani, Shaeda, and Elisabeth Lavault-Olleon. 2009. "Juri- linguistics: between languages and law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 22 (4): 451-458. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-009-9124-6.

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Izzo, Valerio Nitrato. 2012. "Beyond Consensus: Law, Disagreement and Democracy." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 25 (4): 563-575. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-011-9236-7.

ABSTRACT: Nowadays democratic liberal societies face a rising challenge in terms of fragmentation and erosion of shared values and ethical pluralism. Democracy is not anymore grounded in the possibility of a common understanding and interpretation of the same values. Neverthless, legal and political philosophy continue to focus on how to reach consensus, especially through monist, objectualist, contractualist, discursive and deliberative approaches, rather than openly affording the issue of disagreement. Far from being just a disruptive force, disagreement and conflict are matters of fact that no reflection on democracy can underevaluate. They are the major issues through which to look at the intersection of law, politics and morals. The inclusion of dissent is a powerful tool for moral recognition of different understandings of justice. That is where legal procedures become crucial. Law is a fundamental element in the building of a democracy. But it is also particularly exposed to disagreement. Language indeterminacy, dogmatic concepts and value pluralism constitute the main elements that lead to alternative and conflicting interpretations of law in a democratic framework. Major legal progress in the past has come from different understandings of the same legal materials. In this article I argue that respect for disagreement should be a moral principle in democracy and that the role of legal disagreement is essential to understand the evolution and the future directions of democracy as the government of a political community. To do so, a link between respect for disagreement and legal interpretation and argumentation must be established in order to make room for reason and avoid extreme skepticism on the contribution of law to the enforcement of democracy.

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Jackson, Bernard S. 2011. "Liability for Animals: An Historico-Structural Comparison." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 24 (3): 259-289. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9181-x.

ABSTRACT: This account of civil liability for animals in a range of ancient, mediaeval and modern legal systems (based on a series of studies conducted early in my career: (s.1)) uses semiotic analysis to supplement the insights of conventional legal history, thus balancing diachronic and synchronic approaches. It reinforces the conventional historical sensitivity to anachronism in two respects: (1) (logical) inference of underlying values from concrete rules (rather than attending to literary features of the text) manifests cognitive anachronism, an issue manifest in biblical scholarship's discussion of the stoning of the homicidal ox in Exod. 21:28 (s.2); (2) similarly, we see from analysis of Exod. 21:35 that the application of modern notions of literal (rather than narrative) meaning not only manifests a semiotic anachronism but here also obscures the institutional origins of many of the rules in a system heavily reliant on self-help and informal settlement (s.3). At the same time, we find in the patterning of remedies exemplification of a basic Saussurean principle: the meaning of a term (here, a rule) is a function of its relationship to other terms in the same semantic system. In this context, there is a structural principle which correlates degrees of remedy with degrees of fault. However, in the history of their literary reception from the ancient sources, we find that particular rules (particularly where liability is based on scienter) take on new meanings in the context of the system into which they are received (s.4). In addition to the goring ox/pauperies/scienter/traditions, the legal systems here studied also offer remedies for depasturation. The relationship between the two sets of remedies is discussed in terms of a Greimassian-inspired analysis of the "narrative typifications of action'' which underlie them, and which help to explain (at a factual or narrative, rather than doctrinal level) why some cases appear "easy'' while others present themselves as "hard'' (s.5). This is distinguishable from the doctrinal formulations of the distinctions between these sets of remedies, which in both the Jewish and Roman sources import an Aristotelian, teleological conception of nature (reflecting contingent social values, themselves analysable, in semiotic terms, as modalities), which only in later times was modified in favour of a more purely descriptive conception. These doctrinal accounts reflect professionalisation not only in their forms of discourse, but also in the institutional structures they presuppose (s.6). I conclude (s.7) with an attempt more precisely to formulate this correlation between the semiotic and institutional development, insisting that professional dogmatic discourse should not be understood simply as reflecting a higher level of cognitive development, but must also take account of the pragmatics of the particular professional discourse.

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Jackson, Bernard S. 2014. "Jurisprudence and Communication: Secular and Religious." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 27 (3): 463-484. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-013-9348-3.

ABSTRACT: In considering Van Schooten's study of the Eric O. case (s.1), I ask whether the different approaches taken by the two different "legal institutions"-the prosecuting authorities on the one hand, the courts on the other-are reflective of different images of warfare (a semantic difference) or of the different images each group holds of its own role (a pragmatic difference). If we consider these two "legal institutions" as distinct semiotic groups (s.2), is there an inevitable "communication deficit" (Van Schooten) between them (and the public) and how does this relate to the Hartian account of such a "crisis in communication" (s.3)? I agree with Van Schooten about the role of underlying images in the construction of legal sense, and relate this to the issue of intuitional judgment, both in and outside the law (s.4). I then turn to comparable issues which arise in my other research area, Jewish law, which reflects quite different ideological premises (s.5), reviewing the original (biblical) conception of the (intuitive) role and functions of judges (s.5A), decision-making, justification and consequentialist ethics in postbiblical Jewish law (s.5B), and the conclusions drawn, not least for the pragmatics of communication, in a recent research study on the wife's rights in divorce. Paradoxically, I argue (s.5C), that the system rests at base on trust rather than objective truth. But trust, too, is a form of meaning, and susceptible to semiotic analysis. I suggest, in conclusion (s.6), that this is an issue which should be treated more seriously in the theory of secular law and legal communication.

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Jemielniak, Joanna. 2018. "Comparative Analysis as an Autonomization Strategy in International Commercial Arbitration." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 31 (1): 155-173. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9530-0.

ABSTRACT: The article explores the unique character of international commercial arbitration as a globalized phenomenon, where universalizing and harmonizing effects have largely been achieved by private means and spontaneous expansion, outside the States' direct intervention and control. The evolution of arbitration in recent decades from an alternative to the core mechanism of deciding cross-border commercial controversies is considered. Privatization of this area of dispute resolution is examined in the context of its growing autonomization, marked-as observed by Emmanuel Gaillard-by notable changes in its theoretical representations and narratives. This specific conceptual, institutional, and procedural framework of commercial arbitration reflects the demands of decision-making exercised in a legally, linguistically, and culturally diversified environment. Interpretation and application of law in arbitral cases requires skillful navigation between the rules of domestic, international and transnational origin, performed not only on the level of substantive norms, but also on those involving conflict of laws and procedure. As a consequence, comparative analysis plays a critical and complex role in arbitral decision-making, reaching beyond the mere demands of rendition of relevant provisions, and has been defined sensu largo as a 'comparative mindset', characteristic to international commercial arbitration. The article examines this phenomenon and its mechanics, challenges for legal professions and the effect of transnationalization of relevant domestic rules. It also explains the role of comparative analysis as an important instrument, used strategically in the processes of autonomization of commercial arbitration.

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Jiménez-Salcedo, Juan. 2020. "Le débat autour du bilinguisme des juges à la Cour suprême du Canada : analyse de la doctrine et des débats parlementaires." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 33 (2): 325–351. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09709-6.

ABSTRACT: Il n’existe aucune disposition législative ou constitutionnelle qui oblige les juges de la Cour suprême du Canada à maîtriser le français, pourtant l’une des deux langues officielles du pays. Ceci est d’autant plus surprenant que ces juges doivent déterminer la constitutionnalité de décisions liées à des causes parfois débattues en français auprès d’instances inférieures, ou encore être capables d’interpréter la législation bilingue du Canada. Ils doivent également être capables de lire l’abondante doctrine québécoise en matière de droit civil, majoritairement publiée en français. Pour résoudre ce problème, plusieurs projets de loi ont été déposés à la Chambre des communes depuis 2008, leur but étant de rendre obligatoire le bilinguisme des juges. Ils ont été longuement débattus à la Chambre et au Sénat, produisant un vaste corpus de discours. Parallèlement, la doctrine juridique francophone s’est emparée du débat et a avancé des arguments intéressants. Ces deux sources – les débats parlementaires et la doctrine – constituent un ensemble cohérent que nous analyserons dans cet article au moyen de trois fils conducteurs : le droit à être compris par un juge comme un droit linguistique, la considération du bilinguisme comme une compétence juridique, de même que la définition du degré de bilinguisme nécessaire pour remplir les obligations de juge à la Cour suprême.

internal-pdf://2643543554/05 Jimenez Salcedo edits.docx.

Jimenez-Salcedo, Juan. 2020. "Le debat autour du bilinguisme des juges a la Cour supreme du Canada: analyse de la doctrine et des debats parlementaires." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (2): 325-351. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09709-6.

ABSTRACT: ResumeIl n'existe aucune disposition legislative ou constitutionnelle qui oblige les juges de la Cour supreme du Canada a maitriser le francais, pourtant l'une des deux langues officielles du pays. Ceci est d'autant plus surprenant que ces juges doivent determiner la constitutionnalite de decisions liees a des causes parfois debattues en francais aupres d'instances inferieures, ou encore etre capables d'interpreter la legislation bilingue du Canada. Ils doivent egalement etre capables de lire l'abondante doctrine quebecoise en matiere de droit civil, majoritairement publiee en francais. Pour resoudre ce probleme, plusieurs projets de loi ont ete deposes a la Chambre des communes depuis 2008, leur but etant de rendre obligatoire le bilinguisme des juges. Ils ont ete longuement debattus a la Chambre et au Senat, produisant un vaste corpus de discours. Parallelement, la doctrine juridique francophone s'est emparee du debat et a avance des arguments interessants. Ces deux sources - les debats parlementaires et la doctrine - constituent un ensemble coherent que nous analyserons dans cet article au moyen de trois fils conducteurs: le droit a etre compris par un juge comme un droit linguistique, la consideration du bilinguisme comme une competence juridique, de meme que la definition du degre de bilinguisme necessaire pour remplir les obligations de juge a la Cour supreme.

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Johnson, Laura Story. 2012. "The Integration of the European Union and the Changing Cultural Space of Europe: Xenophobia and Webs of Significance." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 25 (2): 211-224. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9187-4.

ABSTRACT: The dialogic relationship between individuals and the cultural space of Europe embodies cultural definitions, political definitions and individual definitions. As individuals draw from Europe as a cultural space and strive to identify and define themselves, definitions are created against an "other,'' leading to Europe being defined against the "ther.'' Identity is established through difference, and in this, the relationship between the EU-a force of integration-and Europe as a cultural space is strained. As boundaries change through the European Union, transforming the cultural space of Europe, the "other'' against whom individuals have traditionally defined themselves is also transforming. This article asks if the integration of Europe through the European Union is resulting in the political mobilization of xenophobia and thereby transforming the cultural space of Europe into a xenophobic space. As many academics and professionals have argued that xenophobia in Europe has been on the rise since the 1990s, this paper will question how the relationship between the European Union-as a force of European integration-and Europe-as a cultural space-is contributing to the construction of xenophobia.

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Just, Gustavo. 2016. "Interpretative Choices and Objectivity-Oriented Legal Discourse: A Strategic Analysis of the ECtHR Ruling on the French Face Veil Ban." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 29 (3): 577-594. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9443-8.

ABSTRACT: On the 1st of July 2014 the European Court of Human Rights upheld the French legislation banning the wearing in public of the full-face veil. The article describes the intriguing justification given by the Court, notably the argument that the ban was justified as necessary to protect the principle of "living together", and analyses it as an attempt to avoid rhetorically costlier justifications, such as those mobilising the principles of gender equality and human dignity. The analysis is undertaken in the light of the general hypothesis that one of the factors presiding over interpretative choices, in complex legal cases, is a strategic reasoning taking into account, on the one hand, the benefits and costs of each argumentative possibility for the persuasiveness and objectivity of the justification to be given in the case pending before the Court, and, on the other hand, the corresponding losses and gains of future interpretative power.

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Kalinowski, G. 1990. "Ontic and Deontic." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 3 (8): 133-146. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01130221.

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Kallast, Kadri. 2020. "So Close and Yet So Far: The Distant Heritage of the Historical Urban Landscapes of Residential Districts of Tartu, Estonia." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09738-1.

ABSTRACT: The urban landscapes of residential areas outside of historic city centres have been increasingly recognized as cultural heritage and as potentially powerful source of meaning for local identities. In Estonia, many municipalities have established milieu protection areas, among them the town of Tartu which has currently ten areas, mainly comprising residential areas developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The authorised heritage discourse proceeds from the historical values in these areas, yet in its dialogue with the public, be it via the comprehensive plan or in discussions about single projects, it focuses on setting restrictive conditions to construction and renovation, instead of properly communicating the historical values. The neighborhood societies' input to the comprehensive plan indicates a lack of sufficient links between the historical urban landscapes and the inhabitants' lives, often leading to the local heritage to be distant for them which in turn tends to lead to maltreatment of the historical substance. Promoting community identity formation with a narrative approach would favor these links to develop, favoring the inhabitants of these historical urban landscapes to continue the life and stories of the heritage.

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van de Kerchove, Michel. 2012. "Langage Juridique et Langage Usuel: Vrais ou Faux Amis?" International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 26 (4): 833-848. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9282-9.

ABSTRACT: This article tries to bring to light the mistaken idea that the words the law borrows from plain language, without explicit definition, should keep their original meaning; Although legal language and plain language are obviously close ‘‘friends’’, they seem to be also ‘‘false friends’’, because these words belonging to two different languages have, beyond their formal similarities, partially different meanings. For this purpose, this article provides a critical analysis of the reference of the belgian case law to the ordinary meaning of words. This reference is analysed in relation to three different matters: interpretation, legality, and autonomy of criminal law.

internal-pdf://2486371861/Kerchove-2012-Langage Juridique et Langage Usu.pdf.

Kireeva, Elena Z. 2017. "Modality of Obligation as a Legal Phenomenon (in the Context of Regional Legislation)." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (1): 129-150. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9485-6.

ABSTRACT: This article discusses deontic modality in the context of legal documents and its divergence from the natural, conventional, interpretation. This work demonstrates that the meaning of the performative verb is not purely linguistic. A number of non-linguistic factors cause the variation of meanings of performatives, in this case, when expressing prohibition, permission, recommendation, advice, proposal or request. These factors include: status of the addressee, type of the relationship between the author and the addressee, type of the document, possibility of control and subsequent punishment for the breach of a norm, methodology of legal drafting, traditions of the Russian document processes. There is no direct association between the type of the legal norm (permissive, obligatory, prohibitive) and the meaning of the performative. To express its will, a regional law-maker, to a varying degree, uses orders, prohibition and permissions. These are dictated by the type of the document.

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Kjær, Anne Lise. 2008. "The Every-Day Miracle of Legal Translation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 21 (1): 67-72. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-007-9057-x. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11196-007-9057-x.

internal-pdf://0719884987/Kjær-2008-The Every-Day Miracle of Legal Trans.pdf.

Kjaer, Anne Lise. 2008. "Translating Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 21 (1): 67-72. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-007-9057-x.

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Klodawski, Maciej. 2021. "Referring Phrases with Deictic Indication and the Issue of Comprehensibility of Texts of Normative Acts: The Case of Polish Codes." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 34 (2): 497-524. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09764-z.

ABSTRACT: The paper focuses on a specific type of referring legal provisions, in which the referring phrase contains a component that indicates the position of a certain fragment of the same text of a normative act by determining the position of that fragment in relation to the fragment in which the given referring phrase is located. Despite the fact that these referrals, called deictic, may be perceived as uncomplicated in structure and as functioning correctly in legal texts, many theoretical as well as practical problems arise during their drafting and legal interpretation. The article attempts to reveal, organize and name these problems basing on the conceptual grid formulated by Studnicki, Lachwa, Fall and Stabrawa as a universal, although not widely known outside Polish jurisprudence, tool for analysing and solving referring provisions as elements of various legal systems, especially continental ones. Texts of selected Polish Codes have been chosen as an illustrative material of deictic referrals which have been incorrectly formulated as leaving space for interpretative doubts in terms of place of indication (demonstratum) and place of reference (referent), which also causes a potential problem of the deferred ostension phenomenon noticed by Quine. The author argues that proper drafting of referring legal provisions with deictic indication requires that the legislator should have extensive pragmalinguistic knowledge and is an essential part of law-making oriented towards achieving comprehensibility of texts of normative acts, especially as important as Codes.

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Konczol, Miklos. 2009. "What There is Left and How It Works: Ancient Rhetoric and the Semiotics of Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 22 (4): 399-410. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-009-9117-5.

ABSTRACT: The present paper examines three parts of ancient school rhetoric: the issues, the topics, and the questions of style from the perspective of legal semiotics. It aims (1) to demonstrate the roles these have played and can play in the interpretation of legal discourses; and (2) to summarise what insights have been and can be gained from this classical tradition by contemporary legal research. It is argued that the promise of legal semiotics for rhetorical investigations is that it may help to make sense of the functioning of the system of ancient rhetoric, and contribute to our understanding of how rhetorical tradition works, while the research of ancient rhetoric can explore a range of semiotic devices essential for lawyerly thinking, resulting in the knowledge of a richer framework of interpretation.

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Kumar, Shailesh. 2017. "Interpreting the Scales of Justice: Architecture, Symbolism and Semiotics of the Supreme Court of India." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (4): 637-675. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9513-1.

ABSTRACT: The neutrality of the art and architecture of courtrooms and courthouses has dominated the public perception in the Indian context. The courtroom design and the visual artistic elements present within these judicial places have very often been considered to be insignificant to the notions of law and justice that they reflect. As art and architecture present certain historical narratives, reflect political allegories and have significant impact on the perceptions of their viewers, they have critical socio-political ramifications. This makes it pertinent to explore them and investigate the paradox of their deployment and interpretation in today's increasingly mediatized world. Through an ethnographic study of the Supreme Court of India, this paper interprets its art and architecture, and, the symbolism and semiotics reflected through them. Arguing against their neutrality and insignificance, the paper demonstrates how they reflect nationalism, certain ideologies and power-space dynamics. It further argues that they act as evidence of political metaphors related to justice, power and democracy. With a conversation between law, architecture and semiotics, the paper investigates the historical and spatial dimensions of its architecture and artistic elements. Mapping the Court's architectural elements, I examine how the visual representation of 'justice as virtue' finds translation in its design through transfer of certain images, including the image of the 'scales of justice', into it, while absenting the notion of 'justice as struggle'-to contemplate on how legal architecture gives evidence to the vexed relationship between law and justice and also of the break from the colonial past.

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Kurzon, Dennis. 2011. "Moment of Silence Constitutional Transparency and Judicial Control." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 24 (2): 195-209. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9205-6.

ABSTRACT: The paper looks at the establishment of religion clause in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, and cases, e.g. Brown v. Gilmore, followed by Croft v. Perry and Sherman v. Koch, cases that relate to the concept of the "moment of silence'' in educational institutions in which it was claimed that such events constitute a breach of the establishment clause. Courts have been inconsistent in their decision-making, which may indicate a lack of transparency not only in the interpretation of the relevant phrase in the Constitution but also in the judicial interpretation of the "three-pronged test'' with regard to "excessive entanglement'' as laid out in Lemon v. Kurtzman of 1971. The paper discusses the "moment of silence'' within the framework of a model of silence in which this type of silence would be labeled as either textual or situational silence.

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Labi, Clement. 2020. ""Kripkenstein" in Legal Interpretation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (4): 1059-1072. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09772-z.

ABSTRACT: Saul Kripke, commenting on Wittgenstein'sPhilosophical Investigations(his idiosyncratic understanding of Wittgenstein's work came to be known asKripkenstein), relates the following thought experiment: let us suppose that one has never added numbers greater than 50 before. A "bizarre sceptic" could argue that there is no hard evidence against the hypothesis that it has only ever been meant for instance, that: if x, y < 57, x "plus" y = x + y if x, y >= 57, x "plus" y = 5 What can be retorted to that man? This problem appears in some extreme cases of problematic legal interpretation. One particularly telling example is that of space law. In a sense, the very existence of space law reflects the attitude of Kripkenstein's sceptic, in the sense that, above a certain altitude, the traditional held rules cease to apply. We propose however that any understanding of changes of legal interpretation must take the paradox into account, and that instances of breaking precedent, in particular, can be fruitfully construed in light of Kripkenstein's hypotheses. Additionally, and as noted by Jean-Michel Salanskis, if we were to justify that by "plus", it has always been meant "addition", we would therefore need to infer another rule (a rule of interpretation). This rule needs, in its turn to be justified by another rule etc., hence the necessity for legal practitioners to define these rules and generally establish a closed, functional and coherent system of hermeneutics. Religious law offers strikingly extreme thoughts experiments in the same matter.

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Lalani, Shaheeza. 2017. "Ascertaining Foreign Law: Problems of Access and Interpretation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (1): 51-66. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9481-x.

ABSTRACT: This article, which analyses relevant cases that have already been the subject of academic commentary, examines some of the most commonly recurring problems in the proper ascertainment of foreign law. Drawing parallels to translation theories, the article examines best practices for foreign law experts and situational factors that sometimes result in the misapplication of foreign law.

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Lee, Jieun. 2015. "How Many Interpreters Does It Take to Interpret the Testimony of an Expert Witness? A Case Study of Interpreter-Mediated Expert Witness Examination." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 28 (1): 189-208. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-013-9346-5.

internal-pdf://1129566236/Lee-2015-How Many Interpreters Does It Take to.pdf.

Legrand, Pierre. 2013. "‘What Can You Say, Words It Is, Nothing Else Going’." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 26 (4): 805-832. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-013-9308-y.

ABSTRACT: This essay examines the capacity of language (‘word’) to convey what there is (‘world’). It draws on philosophical thought, which it seeks to apply to law while making specific reference to comparative legal studies, that is, to the inves- tigation of law that is foreign to its interpreter.

internal-pdf://3119382862/Legrand-2013-‘What Can You Say, Words It Is, N.pdf.

Leisser, Daniel, and Luke Green. 2021. "Das osterreichische UGB-The Austrian Business Code." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 34 (1): 289-294. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09793-8.

ABSTRACT: Seven years after publishing the translation of the Austrian Civil Code in 2013, Eschig and Pircher-Eschig put forward a translation of the Austrian Business Code (UGB) into English. In this article, we present a review of the work, considering its structure, legal-linguistic equivalence, and culture-sensitive accuracy, and we evaluate the overall quality of the legal translation provided. We find that the translation of the Business Code constitutes an invaluable source of reference not only for legal practice but also for research in various fields, such as applied legal linguistics, lexicography, translation studies, comparative law and many more. We conclude that Eschig's and Pircher-Eschig's translation of the Business Code displays a high level of linguistic and metalinguistic awareness, as they carefully deal with the complex legal lexis involved, the projected agents using it, and the wider civil law discourse in which it is embedded. We finally call for a succinct translation of the Austrian Code of Civil Procedure to provide coherence within translations across Austrian civil law.

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Leone, Massimo. 2009. "The Semiotic Therapy of Religious Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 22 (3): 293-306. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-009-9114-8.

ABSTRACT: Religion can bring about social harmony as well as social conflict. Religious law is a key element in both cases. Scholars can explain how religious law changes according to historical and socio-cultural context. They can also help reengineering prescriptions that cause social conflict. Changes in religious law can be explained according to a chronological rhetoric (certain agents cause certain changes) or according to a logical rhetoric (a change acquires its meaning in opposition to other possible changes). The two approaches are complementary, but the semiotics of religious law predominantly adopts the second one. In both cases, the explanation of how a religious law changes and the reengineering of a religious prescription are related activities. The semiotics of religious law is particularly equipped to propose alternatives for conflicting prescriptions. However, there is a difference between showing that some alternatives exist and advocating which alternatives should be taken. Whilst the latter position is similar to that of semiotic guerrilla warfare, the former rather configures the semiotics of religious law as a therapy. Semiotic guerrilla warfare stresses the need to demystify the discourse of power that subjugates individuals or groups to a certain religious law. Semiotic therapy does not focus on demystification but on reconciliation. The task of the semiotic therapy of religious law is to show that situations of social conflict generated by certain prescriptions can be decreased or eliminated by adopting alternative paths of meaning. The semiotic therapist of religious law can be effective in showing these alternatives only if some pragmatic and semantic preconditions are met: a correct involvement with the sets of religious core values at stake and an articulated analysis of the paths of meaning to which these values give rise.

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Leone, Massimo. 2013. "The Semiotics of Fundamentalist Authoriality." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (1): 227-239. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9304-7.

ABSTRACT: The essay seeks to single out, describe, and analyze the main semiotic features that compose the fundamentalist understanding of authoriality. Given a definition of authoriality as the series of semiotic dynamics that induce a reader to posit a genetic relation between an author and a text, the fundamentalist authoriality is characterized as displaying six main traits. First, centrality of the written text: in order to postulate a perfect coincidence between a transcendent intentio auctoris (intention of the author) and an immanent intentio lectoris (intention of the reader), fundamentalist exegetical and juridical hermeneutics must be anchored to a stable message, canonized into a written verbal text or into a corpus of written verbal texts. Second, fundamentalist authoriality rests on the assumption of the immutability and mono-centrism of the religious semiosphere that irradiates from the written text. Third, literalism, infallibility, and non-contradiction are attributed to the relation between the written text, its exegetical hermeneutics, and the pragmatic normative orders to which it gives rise. Fourth, fundamentalist authoriality rules out any potential duplicity of the operations that 'extract' meaning from religious texts. Fifth, the assumption of the immutability of the religious text leads to exclusion of any operation that might alter the form of both its expression and content, hence to stigmatization of translation. The sixth feature of fundamentalist authoriality encompasses all the previous ones: in fundamentalism, a religious text is not actually a text anymore, but a mirror, whose passive reflection of the exegete's mind undermines the semiotic nature of the relation between the reader and the text.

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Leone, Massimo. 2020. "The Limits of Digital Interpretation: Semantic Versus Syntactic Connectedness." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (4): 969-982. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09726-5.

ABSTRACT: The concept of reasonability is key in Umberto Eco's interpretive semiotics, where it enables the formation of a community of interpreters that avoids both extremes of fundamentalism and anarchy. Such concept, however, is not immune from the technological infrastructure in which interpretation takes place. In the digital sphere, the notion itself of community is deeply altered as a consequence of fundamental change in the very nature of connectedness and connections among members. Whereas in the pre-digital world, semantic communality would ground connectedness and the ensuing communities, in digital social networks syntactic communities prevail, where clusters of members emerge out of contagion and memetic force more than through sharing of actual semantic content. The passage from semantic to syntactic connectedness deeply affects the nature of communities and the ways in which they find cohesion. In the digital world, communities are not only syntactic more than semantic, but also quantitative more than qualitative, and negative more than positive: they take shape around what they oppose, more than around what they propose. The market is a fundamental force behind the technological framework of such new communities, since it engineers them so as to both monitor them and profit by their constant litigiousness.

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Leszczynski, Leszek. 2020. "Extra-Legal Values in Judicial Interpretation of Law: A Model Reasoning and Few Examples." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (4): 1073-1087. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09773-y.

ABSTRACT: The aim of the paper is to analyze the types of interpretative reasoning determining the content of extra-legal criteria contained in general reference clauses. This construction, despite its normative foundation, detaches itself from the intention of the legislator much more than e.g. the principles of law, at the same time extending deliberately judicial discretion. Extra-legal values, identified by courts as to their type and their content, then confronted with internal legal axiology and concretized with respect to the facts of the case, are the most crucial part of reasoning that affects the process, results and roles of particular rules of judicial interpretation. It reduces the role of language and systemic rules, connecting the effect of determining the content of extra-legal values primarily with the type of political system and the related scope of judicial autonomy. The different impact between democratic and authoritarian regimes on judicial reasoning is confirmed by the analyzed examples of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and the Polish courts deciding in the period before and after 1989.

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Leszczynski, Leszek. 2020. "Implementing Prior Judicial Decisions as Precedents: The Context of Application and Justification." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (1): 231-244. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09674-9.

ABSTRACT: The paper concerns the conditions and methods of using previous judicial decisions as a kind of precedents in the processes of application of law within the statutory legal order. The use of such decisions, not announced by the legislator, depends on the courts, undertaking such actions on the grounds of similarity of cases or of decisional processes. Such decisions do not become an exclusive validation argument and may create a situation of their potential conflict with legal regulations as well as an inferential supplementation of their content. Dissemination of such activity of the courts leads to the development of precedential practice (relevant to the statutory legal order), though, its actual jurisdictional role depends on proper justification of decisions, within which reference to these decisions should be adaptive (in relation to the elements of the current case), generalizing (forming elements of ratio decidendi) as well as argumentative and discursive (in respect of the way in which the decisional reasoning and arguments expressed in the prior justification are used).

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Leung, Ester S. M. 2014. "What Can a Bilingual Corpus Tell Us About the Translation and Interpretation of Rape Trials?" International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 28 (3): 469-483. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-014-9400-y.

internal-pdf://2511711973/Leung-2014-What Can a Bilingual Corpus Tell Us.pdf.

Leung, Ester S. M. 2019. "The Jurisprudence and Administration of Legal Interpreting in Hong Kong (1966–2016)." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 32 (1): 95-116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9535-8.

ABSTRACT: Legal interpreting and translation are some of the oldest and most frequently practised bilingual activities in Hong Kong. The principles and operation of the bilingual legal system actually impinge on the legal interpreting services and the practices of legal interpreting services also in ways impact on the system itself. This study adopts a historical approach to analyse the jurisprudence and administration of legal interpreting in Hong Kong courts from 1966 to 2016 (half a century), across the 1997 dividing line between British colonial rule and the return of Hong Kong to the government of mainland China. It focuses on the opinions of judges and other participants in courtroom proceedings as recorded in Hong Kong case reports. It is discovered that the jurisprudence of having an interpreter to interpret for participants who do not speak the language of the court is clearly indicated and well versed in the precedents. However, there is a gap between the jurisprudence and the actual interpreting services, mainly caused by the malpractices of the concerned administration department(s) and some of the law enforcement agents working in the frontline.

internal-pdf://1927495861/Leung-2019-The Jurisprudence and Administratio.pdf.

Leung, Ester S. M. 2019. "The Jurisprudence and Administration of Legal Interpreting in Hong Kong (1966-2016)." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 32 (1): 95-116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9535-8.

ABSTRACT: Legal interpreting and translation are some of the oldest and most frequently practised bilingual activities in Hong Kong. The principles and operation of the bilingual legal system actually impinge on the legal interpreting services and the practices of legal interpreting services also in ways impact on the system itself. This study adopts a historical approach to analyse the jurisprudence and administration of legal interpreting in Hong Kong courts from 1966 to 2016 (half a century), across the 1997 dividing line between British colonial rule and the return of Hong Kong to the government of mainland China. It focuses on the opinions of judges and other participants in courtroom proceedings as recorded in Hong Kong case reports. It is discovered that the jurisprudence of having an interpreter to interpret for participants who do not speak the language of the court is clearly indicated and well versed in the precedents. However, there is a gap between the jurisprudence and the actual interpreting services, mainly caused by the malpractices of the concerned administration department(s) and some of the law enforcement agents working in the frontline.

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Leung, Janny H. C., and Marco Wan. 2012. "Constructing the Meaning of Obscenity: An Empirical Investigation and an Experientialist Account." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 25 (3): 415-430. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-011-9251-8.

ABSTRACT: This paper takes a bottom-up approach to empirically investigate how people construct the meaning of obscenity, and offers an experientialist, cognitive linguistic account to explain why the term appears to defy definition and makes a problematic legal concept. To study the contextual dependence of the term, we examined the extent to which various item characteristics (such as genre, context, and the race or celebrity status of the people portrayed) and individual variables (such as gender, religion, sexual orientation and previous personal and cultural experiences) influence our perception of seemingly obscene materials. We report correlations that have not been previously shown. The data support the thesis that the meaning of obscenity emerges in a cognitive-affective response that arises during a dynamic process of interpretation, and thus allows for extralegal factors to influence judgment. The results challenge the assumption that obscenity is a symbolic representation of objectively existing reality and argue that community standard of obscenity is a legal fiction.

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Levert, Lionel A. 2015. "The Jurilinguistics: essential support for co-translation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 28 (1): 53-72. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-014-9373-x.

ABSTRACT: The advent and expanding role of jurilinguistics as part of the federal legislative process are closely associated with the gradual recognition of the equal authority of the two linguistic versions of federal legislation, as well as the implementation of co-drafting as the most effective method of taking into account the equal authority of the two official languages of the country. Jurilinguistics gradually made its way into the federal legislative process starting in the mid 70s and quickly resulted in the establishment of a formal group dealing with French jurilinguistics, comprised of Francophone drafters and jurilinguists. Jurilinguists played a key role in the development of drafting standards for the drafting of a truly authentic French version of federal legislation. In the late 90s, Anglophone jurilinguists were also hired to ensure the highest quality possible for the English version of the federal laws and, along with their Francophone counterparts, to ensure the functional equivalence of the two language versions. The implementation of the departmental policy on legislative bijuralism constituted an additional challenge for the drafter who, fortunately, can rely on comparative law experts, as well as the sound advice of the jurilinguists, to produce legislative texts that are consistent with the principles of clarity in drafting legal documents.

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Lewis, Frederick. 2010. "Symbolic Conflict and the First Amendment: US Supreme Court Adjudication of the Expression of Condensation Symbols." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 23 (2): 207-220. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9141-5.

ABSTRACT: The interpretation of the US Constitution by the Supreme Court of the US has often focused on conflicts arising from intense differences over the meaning attached to symbols including armbands, flags and banners; statues of the Ten Commandments and other religious symbols; depictions involving indecent images; and the conflicting perceptions of, and reactions to, "dirty'' words. The symbols involved in these conflicts are essentially condensation symbols, and divisions over these decisions reflect cultural rifts that manifest themselves in the profoundly different ways large groups of US citizens perceive images and words that evoke powerful emotional response. The Court has utilized a variety of doctrinal devices while engaging in the process of constitutional interpretation as it has struggled with these controversies in the context shaped by the broader culture that informs and constrains this process and by the elements within it that constantly struggle for validation. But the efficacy of its efforts remains questionable.

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Li, Li. 2012. "Translation as a Complex Inter-linguistic Discourse and its Current Problematic Practice in the Genre of Legal Fiction in China." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 26 (4): 849-859. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9289-2.

ABSTRACT: In comparison with the creation of language, translation from one lan- guage to another offers greater challenges for those working with languages, be the text for translation concerned with philosophy, literature or law, all of which are arguably highly professional domains. When it comes to the translation of legal fiction, a highly interdisciplinary genre, even experienced practicing translators tend to fall short of being well equipped with sufficient legal knowledge and terminol- ogies, not to mention the capacity to detect the subtleties that are inherent in a legal term. All of the problems above account for the often less-than-satisfactory quality of legal fiction in translation, misleading or confusing the potential target audience. After making the prior theoretical investigations, this paper attempts to analyze some problems in the current Chinese translation of such legal novels as Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and then take a corrective stance, hoping to arouse the translators’ awareness of the importance of this genre, as well as their awareness of the essential professional skills they still need to acquire, so that they can reach equivalent accuracy in legal technicalities, as well as subtlety and nuance that reflect the legal spirit.

internal-pdf://0943947580/Li-2012-Translation as a Complex Inter-linguis.pdf.

Li, Li. 2015. "Translation of Chinese Legal Concept of “qinqin xiangyin”." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 28 (1): 177-188. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-014-9377-6.

internal-pdf://2639188910/Li-2015-Translation of Chinese Legal Concept o.pdf.

Liebwald, Doris. 2013. "Law's Capacity for Vagueness." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (2): 391-423. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9288-3.

ABSTRACT: This paper deals with the particularities of vagueness in law. Thereby the question of the law's capacity for vagueness is closely related to the question of the impact of vagueness in law, since exaggerated vagueness combined with the elasticity of legal interpretation methodology may affect the constitutional principles of legal certainty, the division of powers, and the binding force of statute. To represent vagueness and the instability of legal concepts and rules, a Hyperbola of Meaning is introduced, opposing Heck's metaphor of a core and a periphery of meaning. Furthermore, evidence is provided that the use of vague legal concepts and the capability of legal methodology to affect the specific meaning of those concepts, may give rise to astonishing and irrational changes of meaning of the law. Finally the paper sets out in search of an added value of vagueness in law, and weighs several stated pros and contras of vagueness. The paper is written against a background of the German speaking realm.

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Lind, Hans, Christina Mulligan, Michael Douma, and Brian Quinn. 2020. "Translation Approaches in Constitutional Hermeneutics." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 33 (2).

ABSTRACT: In this article, we suggest an alternate approach to interpreting the US Constitution, using founding-era translations. We demonstrate how both symmetries and asymmetries in structure and vocabulary of the languages involved can help in deciding nowadays’ problems of constitutional interpretation. We select seven controversial passages of the US constitution to illustrate our approach: Art. I, § 8, cl. 3 (“to regulate commerce”); Art. II, § 1, cl. 5 (“natural born Citizen”); Art. II, § 2, cl. 3 (“recess”); Art. I, § 6, cl. 1 / Art. I, § 8, cl. 10 / Art. IV, § 2 (“felony”); and Art. IV, § 2, cl. 1 (“privileges and immunities”). Since these passages have recently been debated by constitutional scholars, reassessing them using our method can establish the additional value of our approach to constitutional practice. We presume that our approach is not limited to interpreting the US constitution, but suggest that constitutional hermeneutics in general could profit from adding a translation approach to the toolkit.

internal-pdf://2577736939/04 Hans.docx.

Lindroos-Hovinheimo, Susanna. 2009. "Retracing One's Steps: Searching for the Ethics of Legal Interpretation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 22 (2): 163-178. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-009-9100-1.

ABSTRACT: The article discusses the problem of interpretation in law. Are there some criteria by which we can distinguish a good interpretation from a bad one, interpretation from over-interpretation? It is argued in this article that there is always a choice in defining the meaning of a text and this choice can be seen as an ethical one. This article thus studies the question of limits of interpretation by focusing on the ethical elements of interpretation. It is argued here that legal interpretation contains a requirement of justice that shapes the responsibility that the interpreter carries for his choices of meaning. Therefore the ethical elements of interpretation are especially pressing in the interpretation of legal texts.

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Liu, Yanping. 2014. "Skopos Theory and Legal Translation: A Case Study of Examples from the Criminal Law of the P.R.C." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 28 (1): 125-133. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-013-9353-6.

ABSTRACT: Legal translation (shortened as LT) has become a principal means to unfold Chinese laws to the world in the global era and the study of it has proved to be of practical significance. Since the proper theory guidance is the key to the quality of LT translation, this paper focuses on the Skopos theory and the strategies applied in the practice of LT. A case study of LT examples from the Criminal Law of the P.R.C. has been made while briefly reviewing the Skopos theory and its principles. Started with short discussion of LT, this paper probes into the applica- bility of the three principles of Skopos theory, including the Skopos rule, the coherence rule and the fidelity rule, into the legal texts, especially into the trans- lation of the Criminal Law of the P.R.C. and based on the study, the strategies for LT are proposed, with the hope that it can be useful for reference in other legal texts.

internal-pdf://3130390471/Liu-2014-Skopos Theory and Legal Translation_.pdf.

Lobo-Guerrero, Luis. 2013. "Uberrima Fides, Foucault and the Security of Uncertainty." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (1): 23-37. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9267-8.

ABSTRACT: Uberrima Fides is a legal doctrine that governs insurance contracts and expects all parties to the insurance agreement to act in good faith by declaring all material facts relative to a policy. The doctrine originated in England in 1766 with the case Carter v Boehm ruled by Lord Mansfield. Ever since, it has become, with some differences in interpretation, a cornerstone of insurance relationships around the world. The role that trust plays within it, however, is not simple and should not be taken for granted. While it is expected that an idea of trust represents an order of truth, trust in itself is the outcome of a complex negotiation of moral orders. Semiotically, trust operates here not as a Kantian category for the understanding but as a signifier of an order of truth that upholds the possibility for insurance relationships. Trust, as sign, operates as a condition of possibility for the performance of insurance. In this article, a Foucaultian approach is employed to problematise the idea of trust and its role in insurance relationships. The case of mis-selling of insurance policies in the United Kingdom since the 1980s, which has given rise to numerous legal rulings, is used as the empirical site for the problematisation.

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Lorusso, Anna Maria. 2020. "Between Truth, Legitimacy, and Legality in the Post-truth Era." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (4): 1005-1017. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09752-3.

ABSTRACT: The post-truth regime is a regime in which certain central categories of modernity seem to be inadequate: that of truth as correspondence, that of truth as verification, and that of truth as sincerity. This reflection aims at proposing a shift from the category of truth to the category of legitimacy, in order to rethink (replace?) those of correctness, objectivity, adequacy. The advantage potentially offered by the concept of legitimacy, with regards to that of truth, has to do with the reference to a given context (wherein truth tends to be a universal ideal), with an element of social recognition (wherein truth does not depend on recognition; it is valid per se) and a processual dimension (wherein truth does not become truthful), which makes the management of discourses more flexible, without abdicating to their deregulation.

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Madrilejos, Justine Iscah F., and Rachelle Ballesteros-Lintao. 2020. "Interpreting the Arguments of China and the Philippines in the South China Sea Territorial Dispute: A Relevance-Theoretic Perspective." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09770-1.

ABSTRACT: The South China Sea territorial dispute has been a contentious issue in the international community. In the course of 3 years, China and the Philippines had undergone arbitral proceedings over the maritime rights and entitlements in the South China Sea. As the Permanent Court of Arbitration reached its decision, this paper aims to examine the interpretation process of the Arbitral Tribunal in the judgment of the South China Sea conflict between China and the Philippines. The primary objective of the study is to reconstruct or explain how the Tribunal came up with its interpretation of the written arguments presented by the parties involved and to distinguish whether such reconstruction the Tribunal has successfully interpreted or made sense of the said arguments and submissions. Doing so would necessitate a pragmatic analysis- the relevance-theoretic account of human communication and cognition. Data analyzed include written submissions and arguments as well as the legal documents used during the arbitral process. Using content analysis, the data were evaluated through applying the tool of interpretation based on the criteria set by the three conditions of the relevance theory: (1) logical condition, (2) pragmatic condition, and (3) condition of optimal relevance. This paper argues that in order for the addressee of an utterance, in this case the Arbitral Tribunal, to attain a successful interpretation, it should meet these three conditions. This study found that the reconstruction of the interpretation based on the three conditions showed that the Tribunal had attained a valid and correct interpretation of the Philippines' and China's arguments. Furthermore, the paper asserts that implied conclusion and the contextual assumptions can be a guiding principle for the cognitive comprehension or interpretation of legal texts.

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Maglione, Giuseppe. 2020. "Restorative Justice Policy in Context: A Legal-Archaeological Analysis." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09747-0.

ABSTRACT: This paper provides an original, in-depth analysis of English and Welsh criminal and penal policy on restorative justice. By using a historically-discursive approach-legal archaeology-this study firstly outlines the overarching representations of restorative justice within policy, unpacking their internal organisation. Then, it interprets such patterns of knowledge in light of specific cultural, political and professional transformations involving the Anglo-Welsh criminal justice field over the last 30 years. Along these lines, it generates a historically documented policy map whilst problematising the taken-for-granted images of restorative justice which populate regulations, codes and laws. This has implications for the study of the relationships between restorative justice policy and practice and for future research on the institutionalisation of this 'new' frontier of penality. More generally, the exploration of (unexpected) links between policy, politics and culture, provides material for a critical assessment of how state agencies appropriate community-based and practice-led forms of justice.

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Malloy, Robin Paul. 2009. "Place, Space, and Time in the Sign of Property." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 22 (3): 265-277. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-009-9115-7.

ABSTRACT: Property is a complex sign in semiotics. It is also the source of tension and conflict in law. This paper examines property in triadic terms consisting of what Charles S. Peirce would identify as the icon (firstness), the index (secondness), and the symbol (thirdness). From this perspective the paper explores the ideas of place, space, and time at the iconic level of the sign of property. Discussion addresses the way in which property serves as a coded system for communicating information about a given community's values and its cultural-interpretive hierarchy. Much like an aboriginal songline, property functions as a way of imprinting the land with impressions of social ordering related to place, space, and time. In the context of global trade we therefore observe property conflicts which are sometimes not so much about the technical language of property as they are about tensions among the embedded values in competing signs of property.

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Mannoni, Michele. 2019. "Hefa Quanyi: More than a Problem of Translation. Linguistic Evidence of Lawfully Limited Rights in China." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 32 (1): 29-46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9554-0. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9554-0.

ABSTRACT: This essay addresses the legal meanings of the phrase hefa quanyi (lawful or legitimate rights and interests), an important Chinese legal phrase that is frequently found in many Chinese laws and legal documents, and whose interpretation is claimed by various scholars to affect the alienability of people’s rights. It first challenges the existing translations of the phrase into Italian and English. It secondly delves into its history and etymology, studying the legal meanings that the phrase has had in the various texts of the Constitution of China. It is suggested that hefa quanyi is not the semantic and legal equivalent of Western ‘rights and interests’, but rather that the phrase retains its etymological meaning of ‘power and negatively-connoted profit’. It is further argued that the adjective hefa (lawful) in the phrase is used to impose constraints on the rights and interests that the Chinese people are entitled to.

internal-pdf://3259267421/Mannoni-2019-Hefa Quanyi_ More than a Problem.pdf.

Marsciani, Francesco. 2018. "Staring Animals, Animal Staring: Semiotic Enquiry on Animal Enunciation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 31 (3): 411-420. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9565-x.

ABSTRACT: Can we speak about animal enunciation? More, can we learn something about the formal structure of the enunciation looking at the animal way to staring us and addressing to us with their glances? This contribution tries to describe some real cases of glances exchange between animals and humans (a cat and a dear and me) in order to extract some reflections about the way in which we construct the role of the enunciator in the interspecific relationship. Are animals subjects in their relation with humans? And what "subject" means exactly? A semiotic definition of subject is both narrative and enunciative, and the question is: can we interpretate animal glances as good expressions of subjectivity?.

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Marsh, Charles. 2012. "A Legal Semiotics Framework for Exploring the Origins of Hermagorean Stasis." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 25 (1): 11-29. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9210-9.

ABSTRACT: Stasis is a process of classical rhetoric that identifies the core issue in a trial or a similar debate. Hermagoras of Temnos included the first comprehensive analysis of stasis in his second-century BCE treatise on rhetoric, now lost. Modern scholars tend to echo George Kennedy, who maintains that Hermagoras' inspiration for the hierarchical structure of stasis is indeterminate. This article, however, employs scholarship in legal semiotics, including the work of Miklos Konczol and Bernard S. Jackson, to argue that Hermagoras based stasiastic structure on Aristotle's first-figure syllogism. Ideally, knowledge of that structure can enhance modern applications of stasis.

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Mattila, Heikki E. S. 2008. "Debates on the obscurity and simplification of legislative discourse and legal language." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 21 (1): 57-65. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-007-9056-y.

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Matulewska, Aleksandra. 2019. "Legal and LSP Linguistics and Translation: Asian Languages’ Perspectives." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 32 (1): 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09602-x.

ABSTRACT: This essay opens the Special Issue of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law dedicated to Asian Languages, entitled “Legal and LSP Linguistics and Trans- lation: Asian Languages’ Perspectives”. It focuses on revealing the principal issues discussed in the volume, by positioning the contributors’ works into the general theoretical semiotic perspectives which shape legal languages, legal translation and public discourse over languages spoken in Asia. This volume of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law is composed of nine articles which may be grouped into four categories of problems. The first group in general refers to problems con- nected with legal communication both from interlingual and intralingual perspec- tives. Thus it encompasses four papers dealing with legal translation as well as communication in legal and political settings (Cao in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1–16, 2018; Mannoni in Int J Semiot Law 32(1), 2018; Koptseva and Sitnikova in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1–28, 2018; Alwazna in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1–20, 2018). The second theme focuses on legal interpretation problems in Hong Kong (Leung in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1–22, 2017) and is an important contribution due to the fact that the right to the interpreter and to communication in a language one understands in court proceedings is one of human rights nowadays and as the real life cases indicate is one of the rights which may be easily abused and no one apart from the victim and the interpreter actually may realise that that human right is not properly observed. Furthermore, the consequences of such abuse may have dire consequences for legal communication participants. The next paper, constituting a separate, third theme, is devoted to teaching legal translation and developing legal translators’ competences from the very beginning (Halimi in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1–8, 2018). The last category encompasses three papers devoted to the semiotic analysis of words and images aimed at achieving a specific persuasive result or proper understanding of similar but not identical concepts which may frequently be considered universal despite vital differences resulting from different historical, social or political evo- lution of societies and states (Xu in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1–9, 2018; Abbas and Kadim in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1–20, 2018; Haider and Olimy in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1–32, 2018).

internal-pdf://0945116962/Matulewska-2019-Legal and LSP Linguistics and.pdf.

Matulewska, Aleksandra. 2019. “Legal and LSP Linguistics and Translation: Asian Languages’ Perspectives.” Special issue of International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 32 (1).

File Attachments

Mazzi, Davide. 2010. ""This Argument Fails for Two Reasons.'': A Linguistic Analysis of Judicial Evaluation Strategies in US Supreme Court Judgments." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 23 (4): 373-385. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9162-0.

ABSTRACT: The centrality of argumentation in the judicial process is an age-old acquisition of research on legal discourse. Notwithstanding the deep insights provided by legal theoretical and philosophical works, only recently has judicial argumentation been tackled in its linguistic dimension. This paper aims to contribute to the development of linguistic studies of judicial argumentation, by shedding light on evaluation as a prominent aspect in the construction of the judge's argumentative position. Evaluation as a deep structure of judicial argumentation is studied from a discursive point of view entailing the analysis of a sample of authentic judicial language. Evaluative lexis is investigated within a single genre of judicial discourse, i. e. judgments, instantiated by a corpus of US Supreme Court judgments. Findings show that judges use diversified strategies to take stance as they organise their argumentative discourse: from easily recognisable verbal and adjectival tools to more finely-grained discourse elements such as the encapsulating pattern 'this/these/that/those ? labelling noun'.

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McAuliffe, Karen. 2015. "The Legal Environment of Translation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 28 (4): 871-873. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9409-x.

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McBride, Mark. 2017. "Knowledge and Insanity." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (4): 625-636. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9509-x.

ABSTRACT: This paper lies at the intersection of law and logic. Logical analysis is employed to attempt to make headway in what has proven to be an intractable interpretive debate over a defence provision of the Indian Penal Code.

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Megale, Fabrizio. 2014. "Mondialisation et Traduction Juridique: Nouveaux Parcours de Recherche." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 28 (31): 31-52.

ABSTRACT: So far, legal translation studies have generally been concerned with multilingual legislation, which they have dissected using comparative law methods. The time seems to have come for a differentiated research that recognises various types of legal translation, including the (vast) category of translation by profes- sionals for public authorities and business concerns. This latter category’s context is rapidly changing. Globalization is aggravating the crisis of national legislation. First and foremost, networks of authorities have sprung up alongside international or- ganisations. The texts translated are regulatory rather than prescriptive. Then, in the field of international commerce, a standardization of contracts is occurring. Glob- alized administrative and commercial varieties of English are no longer the English of the common law but, rather, a neutral or hybrid English that needs to be further sub-classified by reference to specific legal sectors. Furthermore, by reducing costs and deadlines, globalization and digitalization have forced translation to be eco- nomically efficient. Several legislative provisions now allow the translation of legal texts by way of extracts or summaries. In multilingual monitoring translators are being asked to assess and select the documents for translation themselves. The quality required is often that which is ‘‘sufficient’’ to achieve the sought-after goal. All these changes must be incorporated into the university education of translators (i.e. by including regulatory and contractual texts, neutral varieties of English, translations in reduced form, assessment and selection of texts and quality calibration).

internal-pdf://1101513699/Megale-2014-Mondialisation et Traduction Jurid.pdf.

Megale, Fabrizio. 2015. "Globalization and Legal Translation: New Research Pathways." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 28 (1): 31-52. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-014-9358-9.

ABSTRACT: So far, legal translation studies have generally been concerned with multilingual legislation, which they have dissected using comparative law methods. The time seems to have come for a differentiated research that recognises various types of legal translation, including the (vast) category of translation by professionals for public authorities and business concerns. This latter category's context is rapidly changing. Globalization is aggravating the crisis of national legislation. First and foremost, networks of authorities have sprung up alongside international organisations. The texts translated are regulatory rather than prescriptive. Then, in the field of international commerce, a standardization of contracts is occurring. Globalized administrative and commercial varieties of English are no longer the English of the common law but, rather, a neutral or hybrid English that needs to be further sub-classified by reference to specific legal sectors. Furthermore, by reducing costs and deadlines, globalization and digitalization have forced translation to be economically efficient. Several legislative provisions now allow the translation of legal texts by way of extracts or summaries. In multilingual monitoring translators are being asked to assess and select the documents for translation themselves. The quality required is often that which is "sufficient" to achieve the sought-after goal. All these changes must be incorporated into the university education of translators (i.e. by including regulatory and contractual texts, neutral varieties of English, translations in reduced form, assessment and selection of texts and quality calibration).

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Mehregan, Abbas. 2016. "Islamo-Arabic Culture and Women's Law: An Introduction to the Sociology of Women's Law in Islam." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 29 (2): 405-424. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9467-8.

ABSTRACT: The present paper addresses the mutual relationship between society and law in shaping women's law in Islam from the perspective of the sociology of law. It analyzes the role of pre-Islamic social, political, and economic structures in the Arabian Peninsula in modeling women's law and highlights some customary laws which were rejected or revived and integrated in Islamic jurisprudence. In this regard, the paper reviews issues such as polygyny, rights to inheritance, marriage, the process of testimony and acceptable forms of evidence in legal matters, diyya (blood money), the exclusion of women from the judiciary and the system of issuing fatwa (legal opinion), natural right of guardianship (wilaya) of underage children after divorce, and regulations related to the veil. Finally, referring to the manner of the Prophet of Islam, the paper suggests that 'urf (custom) can be considered as a source of Islamic legislation alongside other commonly known sources of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence).

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Mercier, Jeremy. 2013. "Pictures of Indian laws." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (3): 721-730. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9287-4.

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Mercier, Jerremy. 2015. "Why I'm afraid of judges The interpretation of the law and the legal principles." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 28 (4): 879-885. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9411-3.

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Messner, Claudius. 2014. "Luhmann's Judgment." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 27 (2): 359-387. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-013-9344-7.

ABSTRACT: This paper explores what is apparently a non-topic for Luhmann. Luhmann is preoccupied with decision-making rather than with judgment. The paper argues that Luhmann, attempting to find a way out of the dilemma between the fundamentalism of positivistic legal theory and the relativism of anti-foundationalist post-modern thinking, presents the epistemological-ethical doublet of a "self-binding" of the law. In this bootstrapping manoeuvre decision plays the central part. The paper begins by examining judgment in its relation to decision as considered by non-system-theoretical thinking. Against that background it unfolds the distinction between distinction, form and decision in systems theory and in the system-theoretical observation of the law. The article then discusses Luhmann's description of the functioning of decision(-making) within the legal system. The hypothesis is that Luhmann blends here cognitive with ethical aspects. Finally, the article addresses Luhmann's polemics against alternative approaches to his own. The suggestion is that 'judgment', in Luhmann's systems theory, re-enters by the back door as an ethical-theoretical imperative that commands theory's responsibility for society and law.

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Messner, Claudius. 2018. "Now This: On the Gradual Production of Justice Whilst Doing Law and Music." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 31 (2): 187-214. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9518-9.

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the role of performance in law and music as a structural means of their self-programming construction. Music and law are considered as parallel social practices or performative doings. The paper begins with a critical analysis of the special aesthetical features of present-day juridical practice as exemplified by legal trial and legal expertise. Drawing upon reflections on the modern discourse on aesthetics and art, the article then examines in greater detail the specific traits of performance in law and jazz music. Performative processes move from representation to presentation, from a preoccupation with rules and controlling to induced self-programming. Both law and jazz regard the unknown future as a resource for present decisions by "inventing" new possibilities; both require, expand and promote a responsibility that does not follow from statutes nor can be expressed in a code of ethics. Finally, the article addresses the performance situation in jazz. Jazz being polyphonic and improvisational by nature, improvisation makes explicit tradition by staging the context dependency of its performance. It is mediated by the knowledge, the operational history and the communication of the participants. Jazz is an exercise in the possibilities of an "aesthetics of imperfection" which can open up new ways of seeing law and politics.

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Messner, Claudius. 2020. "Listening to Distant Voices." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (4): 1143-1173. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09735-4.

ABSTRACT: The "digital revolution", which the juridical observer is asked to tackle, as well as the consequences that legal experts have to deal with, is not an abstract phenomenon. Digitalisation is a consequence and the latest manifestation of the Western culture of the machine. This framework shapes the various concepts of language, political community, and justice, on which, in turn, the diverse current views of the interpreter depend. The twentieth century's globalisation of legal civilisation has perfected the machinery of legal talk. The mechanics of legal decision rules are based upon the automatism of the sentence, the predicative language. Law appears as a "black box". The increase of law's authority and persuasive power depends exactly on this. As the function of rhetoric is to make us see the means of persuasion around each argument, the analysis of law is a matter of rhetoric. Rhetoric analyses particular forms of legal talk as contents. The paper suggests that the basic question of the interpreter's reasonableness is of how to speak of law and justice without coming under the sway of a world-view that treats all law in the terms of the instrumental strategies and technologies typical of the modern society of control. In my opinion, the interpreter's role demands him to become a speaker of a real lingua franca, a language appropriate for making distant voices communicate.

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Mohr, Richard. 2006. "Living Legal Fictions: Constituting the State or Submerging the Signifier?" International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 19 (3): 237-258. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-006-9021-1.

ABSTRACT: This is an inquiry into the ways the state is constituted as an effective legal fiction. It is based on the premise that the state was not constituted, once and for all, some three centuries ago (as Bourdieu suggests) but that the existence of the state relies on continuing legal and social processes. The focus is on the translation from the legal to the social, specifically the semiotic interaction between law, space and daily life in the dynamics of this on-going mise en scene. This requires rethinking a number of semiotic issues: first, Lefebvre's challenge to a semiotics which neglects the place of the material (body, space) and, second, a challenge to Lefebvre's assertions that the state operates in a realm of freedom in switching 'at will' between codes. Third, it is possible to question the conditions by which the state operates as a 'floating signifier', which maintains its domination by overwhelming us with its excess meanings. The inquiry proceeds by analysing the legal semiotics of space in different settings: the axis as an expression of legal and state power, from the courtroom to the capital city (Rome, Washington, Canberra), and street names with legal referents (Montreal and Mexico City, in addition to the above). After considering these self conscious attempts at meaning-making, the article concludes that the legal constitution of the state in urban space is not determined by a single wilful semiotic regime, but (taking insights from de Certeau) is contingent upon the interpretations and enactments of people who use the spaces. Except in the controlled environments of the courtroom and the planned capital city, everyday life is continually reconstituting the meanings of law and the state.

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Monzó-Nebot, Esther, and Javier Moreno-Rivero. 2020. "Jurilinguistics: Ways Forward Beyond Law, Translation, and Discourse." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 33 (2): 253-262. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09721-w.

ABSTRACT: This is the guest editors’ introductory paper to the special issue “Situating jurilinguistics across cultures using translation and discourse approaches.” The introduction showcases the interdisciplinary vocation of jurilinguistics from its conception almost forty years ago. It is argued that jurilinguistics has achieved its current maturity by diversifying the disciplinary lenses of the originally contributing disciplines of legal translation and legal studies while keeping faithful to its original principles—facing practical problems with a rigorous outlook, venturing into any new domains that may prove enlightening, and combining professional and academic perspectives. The authors highlight how the series of conferences “Jurilinguistics: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Language and Law” have been instrumental in enhancing the scope of jurilinguistics. Finally, the articles gathered in this special issue are presented and their contributions in advancing the knowledge available for practitioners and scholars meeting at the interface between law and language are underscored.

internal-pdf://0552910127/01 Introduction.docx

internal-pdf://2426205928/Monzó-Nebot-2020-Jurilinguistics_ Ways Forward.pdf.

Monzó-Nebot, Esther, and Javier Moreno-Rivero. 2020. “Situating jurilinguistics across cultures using translation and discourse approaches.” Special issue of International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 33 (2).

ABSTRACT: Introduction to the special issue

File Attachments

Moor, Pierre. 2013. "The figures of the legal order in the relations between the law and its environment." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (4): 783-804. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-013-9332-y.

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Moor, Pierre. 2020. "The law and its limits: the legal and the non-legal." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09776-9.

ABSTRACT: Sommaire1. Tout systeme juridique est production d'une histoire et d'une culture politiques determinee, qui lui ont donne une organisation specifique. Parler des limites de telles organisations peut s'entendre en deux sens, qui interagissent: premierement, elles peuvent servir a differencier ces systemes par rapport a d'autres ordres normatifs. Secondement, elles designent ce que, par sa texture, le droit est hors d'etat de reussir. 2. On comprend le concept de systeme comme une organisation aux structures differenciees de textes, de normes, d'acteurs. Ce qui caracterise un systeme est son autoreferentialite et ses modes de cloture (qui lui permettent de rester identique a lui-meme) et ses modes d'ouverture (qui permettent les echanges avec son environnement). 3. Concernant la limite dans le second sens, on observera que la normativite comme mode d'action propre au droit le met souvent dans l'incapacite d'assumer pleinement les taches de regulation qui lui sont confiees. Il s'agit d'une part d'une limite factuelle: celle de la technicite et du volume de ces taches. D'autre part, la necessite de plus en plus frequente de prendre en compte les circonstances individuelles concretes de l'application entraine une legistique de diminution de la densite normative et, par consequent, de deplacer une epistemologie fondee sur la repetition en direction de l'innovation. 4. Ces deux facteurs notamment font du droit un univers qui ne peut plus pretendre a une completude coherente: c'est un univers en constante evolution, qui exige pour sa mise en oe uvre, de maniere continue, l'apport d'informations provenant de son environnement. Ces apports circulent dans les modes d'ouverture du droit-la diminution de la densite normative et le recours a des expertises, des savoirs, des deontologies exterieures. Cependant, en vertu de l'autoreferentialite du droit, ces apports doivent etre selectionnes et juridicises pour etre integres dans le systeme juridique et preserver ainsi sa cloture. Il y a la une double programmation a respecter: la selection doit d'une part respecter le cadre normatif du droit et de l'autre porter sur un choix correspondant aux attentes sociales qu'il s'agit de convaincre de son bien-fonde. Les limites du droit par rapport a d'autres ordres normatifs est ainsi definie par l'ordre juridique lui-meme, dans le respect de cette double programmation. 5. Ce systeme a des presupposes politiques, culturels et historiques qui empechent d'elaborer sans autre une essence du droit, valable urbi et orbi: notamment separation des pouvoirs et liberte d'expression. Il n'est meme pas certain qu'il puisse perdurer. En particulier, l'internalisation croissante du droit n'est guere conciliable avec son organisation telle que l'Occident l'a concue. En outre, de plus en plus le droit devient l'objet d'une normativite superieure, au nom de laquelle il est lui-meme juge: c'est le phenomene de l'economisation du droit.

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Moreno-Rivero, Javier. 2017. "Comparative Law for Legal Translators: Series New Trends in Translation Studies." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (4): 711-718. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9511-3.

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Moreteau, Olivier. 2015. "The Louisiana Civil Code in French: translation and retranslation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 28 (1): 155-175. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-014-9391-8.

ABSTRACT: The first codes of Louisiana (1808 and 1825) were written in French and translated into English. The revised Civil Code of 1870 was written in English only. Recent revisions, all in English, aim at promoting a civilian vocabulary, markedly distinct from the common law vocabulary. This article discusses the translation of the Louisiana Civil Code from English into French in the context of the steep decline and limited revival of French language usage in Louisiana. It features the purpose and the step-by-step implementation of the translation project, identifying linguistic and legal challenges and resources relied on. The aim is to produce a truly Louisianan translation. Translators therefore resort to original French sources whenever the text has not slightly evolved or was simply reproduced. The process may then be described as retranslation, aiming at reviving the original language. Where texts have been substantially rewritten, yet still reflect civilian logic and style, the translation aims at echoing the spirit of the Code. However, in the several occasions where the drafters borrowed common law substance and style, the civilian spirit may no longer vivify the translation, as it is obscured by an overabundance of language.

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Morra, Lucia. 2010. "New Models for Language Understanding and the Cognitive Approach to Legal Metaphors." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 23 (4): 387-405. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9163-z.

ABSTRACT: The essay deals with the mechanism of interpretation for legal meta- phorical expressions. Firstly, it points out the perspective the cognitive approach induced about legal metaphors; then it suggests that this perspective gains in plausibility when a new bilateral model of language understanding is endorsed. A possible sketch of the meaning-making procedure for legal metaphors, compatible with this new model, is then proposed, and illustrated with some examples built on concepts belonging to the Italian Civil Code. The insights the bilateral model of understanding provides are compared with the practice followed by legal commu- nities for dealing with the metaphorical expressions they coin and use.

internal-pdf://2807744390/Morra-2010-New Models for Language Understandi.pdf.

Morris, Ruth. 1993. "Interlingual Interpreter — Cypher or Intelligent Participant?, Or, The Interpreter's Turn..." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law.

internal-pdf://1566288701/Morris-1993-Interlingual Interpreter — Cypher.pdf.

Murrow, Gail Bruner, and Richard W. Murrow. 2013. "A Biosemiotic Body of Law: The Neurobiology of Justice." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (2): 275-314. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9292-7.

ABSTRACT: We offer a theory regarding the symbolism of the human body in legal discourse. The theory blends legal theory, the neuroscience of empathy, and biosemiotics, a branch of semiotics that combines semiotics with theoretical biology. Our theory posits that this symbolism of the body is not solely a metaphor or semiotic sign of how law is cognitively structured in the mind. We propose that it also signifies neurobiological mechanisms of social emotion in the brain that are involved in the social and moral decision-making and behavior that law generally seeks to govern. Specifically, we hypothesize that the symbol of a collective human body in the language of law signifies neural mechanisms of pain empathy which generate a virtual, neurally simulated, emotional sense of sharing the feelings or pain of others and of thereby being one-in-body with or virtually equal to them. We speculate that this may be the neural basis of what is signified in legal and political theory as the "body politic'' or "sense of equality,'' because neuroscience and psychiatry further suggest that such pain empathy may provide the natural, emotional motivation to think and act in a rights-based manner. We conclude that misunderstanding of these neural mechanisms of pain empathy and related misinterpretation of this corporeal symbolism for the same may have long resulted in legal discourse that misinterprets the function of "pain'' in the law and misinterprets the associated positive law, specifically the law regarding individual, equality-based rights and criminal justice, in particular, punishment theory.

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Nakane, Ikuko, and Makiko Mizuno. 2019. "Judgments on Court Interpreting in Japan: Ideologies and Practice." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 32 (4): 773-793. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09642-3.

ABSTRACT: Japan saw a sharp increase in the number of non-Japanese residents and migrants during the period of its high economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s. This impacted on how the justice system provides language assistance to non-Japanese speaking background parties in investigative interviews and courtroom proceedings. While the number of defendants who received interpreter assistance in Japanese criminal trials hit its peak in 2003, quality of legal interpreting is still a serious issue. In this article, we discuss how the Japanese criminal justice system has approached issues in judicial interpreting in the last four decades by analysing how “court interpreting” and “court interpreters” have been represented in court decisions. By doing so, the paper aims to explore the judiciary’s ideologies about court interpreting and prob- lematise these ideologies in looking towards improvement of language assistance in the Japanese legal system.

internal-pdf://3130390246/Nakane-2019-Judgments on Court Interpreting in.pdf.

Ng, Eva Nga Shan. 2013. "Garment, or Upper-Garment? A Matter of Interpretation?" International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (3): 597-613. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9290-9.

ABSTRACT: In an adversarial common law courtroom, where one party tries to defeat the other by using words as weapons, polysemous words more often than not pose a problem to the court interpreter. Unlike in dyadic communication, where ambiguity can be easily clarified with the speaker by the hearer, court interpreters' freedom to clarify with speakers is to a large extent restricted by their code of ethics. Interpreters therefore can only rely on the context for disambiguating polysemous words. This study illustrates the problem of polysemy in an interpreter-mediated rape trial. It exemplifies how the interpreter's goal to avoid contradictions by making her interpretation of a polysemous word consistent with the preceding context runs counter to that of the bilingual cross-examiner, whose primary goal is to identify inconsistencies in the hostile witness's testimony in order to discredit him. This study also manifests a denial of the interpreter's latitude in the interpretation of contextual clues and her loss of power in a courtroom with the presence of other bilinguals.

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Nowak-Far, Artur. 2017. "Linking Signifie, with Signifiant: The Court of Justice of European Union as a Product-Defining Authority." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (4): 677-695. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9517-x.

ABSTRACT: Saussurean concept of signifie-signifiant agnation can be used to explain the EU law product-nomenclature referrals. The CJEU has an especially important role in developing detailed rules of product nomenclature interpretation in cases where ambiguities emerge. In its jurisprudence, the CJ pursues preservation of the predominant intuitive model of that interpretation even in cases involving composite products. Only in cases where the composition can easily be identified, the Court relies on the concept of the defining element-i.e. it takes the dominant element of the product as a product nomenclature determining one. With respect to novel products, the CJ applies the same general penchant. Therefore, with respect to such products, the Court attempts to establish their signifie-signifiant match by referring to analogous features and characteristics of already existing products. Such an approach is an evidence of the CJ's self-constraint of its otherwise Demiurgic power concerning the product nomenclature. This argumentation implies that even the CN classification offers a catalogue of relatively rigid designators and that their rigidity is respected by the CJ. The CN designators are not perfectly rigid because the CJ takes into account not only the logical values of respective CN positions, but also the practical aspects (including transactional costs) of the CN classification, as well as the general objectives of EU rules underlying the CN position identification.

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Orts, María Ángeles. 2010. "A Genre-based Approach to the Translation of Private Normative Texts in Legal English and Legal Spanish." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 25 (3): 317-338. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9213-6.

internal-pdf://4059243426/Orts-2010-A Genre-based Approach to the Transl.pdf.

Padjen, Ivan L. 2019. "Systematic Interpretation and the Re-systematization of Law: The Problem, Co-requisites, a Solution, Use." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 33 (1): 189-213. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09672-x.

internal-pdf://2855384468/Padjen-2019-Systematic Interpretation and the.pdf.

Paturet, Arnaud. 2019. "Wood, a wolf skin hood, blood orchards, a bag and a bestiary: some remarks on the punishment reserved for parricide in the Roman world." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 32 (2): 233-263. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9589-2.

ABSTRACT: ResumeSi on la compare avec l'habituelle coercition infligee au condamne a mort dans le monde romain, la peine reservee au parricide ne manque pas de surprendre par son originalite. Le coupable est chausse de sabots de bois, sa tete est ensuite recouverte d'une cagoule en peau de loupet il sera ensuite flagelle a l'aide de verges sanguines. Pour finir, le contrevenant prend place dans un sac de cuir qui sera cousu apres l'intromission d'un bestiaire compose d'un chien, d'un coq, d'une vipere et d'un singe d'apres la description donnee par Modestin au Digeste 48.9.9 pr., ceci avant que l'ensemble ne soit jete a l'eau. Meme si la symbolique precise de chaque element est difficile a saisir en raison de leur origine diffuse, car issue de l'imagination populaire melee a divers substrats religieux imbriques, cette procedure punitive forme un tout coherent qui ne constitue pas un chatiment politise au sens strict, c'est-a-dire deploye dans le cadre juridique de la cite. La justice humaine se borne surtout a etablir la faute gravissime incombant au contrevenant, laquelle remet en cause le socle de l'organisation romaine, ainsi qu'a preparer son rejet total de la communaute humaine et du droit qui y standardise les rapports. En ce sens, l'homme se garde de donner directement la mort au parricide et la procedure d'expulsion n'est pas sans rappeler celle d'autres individus dits << monstrueux >> parce que frappes d'anormalite physique, notamment sexuelle, car ceux-ci remettaient en cause le principe meme de l'existence sociale. Cette priorite absolue que constitue la sauvegarde du groupe social dans le traitement du crime a pu servir de point d'ancrage a certaines positions contemporaines qui commandent d'extraire le contrevenant de l'ordre legal, afin de traiter efficacement un acte considere comme abominable dans l'absolu. C'est l'exemple de la theorie du droit penal de l'ennemi dont les lointaines racines peuvent etre reperees dans les procedes d'expulsions socio-juridiques qui trouvaient a se deployer dans l'Antiquite romaine.

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Paturet, Arnaud. 2019. "Subject, object, res and nature: a historical overview of the evolution of the concept of things from Antiquity to contemporary law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 32 (2): 485-504. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9590-9.

ABSTRACT: Roman Law is often considered as an intellectual matrix of contemporary laws and in particular French civil law. However, even if the vocabulary persisted, some legal concepts went throught great changes across history as law was step by step related to a subject's power. The notion of thing originally meant the trial, the case, the litigious situation managed by the legal process. In this way the thing was directly a res iuris. In contemporary law system, the thing ordinarily specifies some goods on which the subject applies his property power. This view is understandable considering the evolution due to the theorization of subjective law that leads to promote a strong and exclusive separation between persons and things while Roman law could imbricate these legal categories. ResumeLe droit romain est souvent considere comme une matrice intellectuelle, linguistique et conceptuelle des droits europeens contemporains et en particulier du droit civil francais. Toutefois, si le vocabulaire a persiste dans une certaine mesure, des notions juridiques fondamentales ont subi de profondes transformations au cours de l'histoire a mesure que le droit s'assimilait progressivement a un pouvoir. Il en est ainsi du concept de chose, saisi notamment dans son rapport au sujet ou a la nature inanimee, qui designait a l'origine le proces ou la situation litigieuse mise en forme par la procedure juridique en droit romain. Dans le systeme contemporain, la chose signifie d'ordinaire un bien materiel independant du sujet dans la droite application de la theorisation moderne du droit subjectif. Cette conception est le fruit d'une opposition nette entre le sujet et l'objet, laquelle a promu une categorisation etanche des personnes et des choses inconnue du droit romain.

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Pencak, William. 2005. "Canada as a Semiotic Society: Harold Innis, Roberta Kevelson, and the Bias of Legal Communications." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 18 (2): 207-215. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-005-4101-1.

ABSTRACT: The great Canadian economist/philospher Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan's teacher, was also especially interested in the way preserving the common law and multiple interpretive legal perspectives were essential to the preservation of human freedom. He greatly feared the rise of administratively made law as detrimental to the lively political life of free communities. Much of his work on legal theory, in which he urges Canadians to tenaciously protect their complicated legal system, anticipates the legal semiotic of Roberta Kevelson, although they had no knowledge of each other's work and Innis may only have known of Charles Peirce indirectly.

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Pencak, William. 2006. "Centering Medea Amid Lawless Spaces." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 19 (3): 259-273. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-006-9022-0.

ABSTRACT: Medea by Euripides sets up two spaces: Greece (the West or Europe) standing for the masculine, rationality, and law on the one hand, and Colchis (the East or Asia) for the feminine, emotion, and (from the western perspective) lawlessness on the other. These two spaces are given physical, spatial representation in various modern productions of the play and other interpretations of Medea. Some examples: Euripides has Medea and Jason arguing, without understanding each other, across a chasm in the final scene; stage directors clothe the Greeks in austere white; they live in a city; the Asiatics have no city, Medea's colors are black, or earth colors such as green. By defining Medea and her heirs - terrorists, outlaw nations, illegal aliens - as lawless and her nation as a space of lawlessness, nations claiming to stand for rationality, legality, and civilization are able to justify suspending these traits when dealing with those who do not adhere to these norms, all the while overlooking inconsistencies between their own ideas and behavior.

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Pennisi, Antonino, and Laura Giallongo. 2018. "Animal Biopolitics: How Animals Vote." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 31 (3): 491-499. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9560-2.

ABSTRACT: The social research about group decision-making in the human societies has received recent contributions from studies reached in the field of ethology and Game theory. Comparative data revealed the adoption of symbolic systems for vote expression and the consensus achievement in other social species. The wide diffusion of the voting procedure-as a sign of an ecological rationality- in species with different social organizations and cognitive levels, requires a new interpretation of the consensus issue assuming a new evolutionary biopolitical perspective, for the survey of the sociality and in particular of the effects of linguistic rationality on the human group decision-making .

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Peters, Timothy D. 2017. "I, Corpenstein: Mythic, Metaphorical and Visual Renderings of the Corporate Form in Comics and Film." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (3): 427-454. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9520-2.

ABSTRACT: From US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis's 1933 judgement in Louis K Liggett Co v Lee (and, before that, Mourice Wormster's Frankenstein Incorporated) to Matt Wuerker's satirical cartoon "Corpenstein", the use of Frankenstein's monster as a metaphor for the modern corporation has been a common practice. This paper seeks to unpack and extend explicitly this metaphorical register via a recent filmic and graphic interpretation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein myth. Whilst Frankenstein has been read as an allegorical critique of rights-Victor Frankenstein's creation of a monstrous body, reflecting the figurative construction of a body by rights discourse-the metaphoric notion of reanimating a 'soulless corpse' resonates with Edward's Thurlow's description of the corporation as having 'no soul to damn'. By exploring the figurative and optical representations of this process of reanimating the body in Scott Beattie's film I, Frankenstein and Kevin Grevioux's companion graphic novel I, Frankenstein: Genesis, I would like to extend this metaphoric register, by examining the theological origin and nature of the corporate form. This theology is explicitly referenced in the film and graphic novel via the battle between Gargoyles and Demons, which dominates the plot and backstory. The role of Frankenstein's monster-now called Adam-however, is about enabling the reanimation of thousands of corpses without souls for possession by the demon hoard headed by Prince Naberius, who in his alternative persona Charles Wessex, controls the Wessex Institute and Wessex Industries. This 'corporate baron' himself has devoted his 'life' to enabling the rediscovery of Frankenstein's ability to reanimate the dead for the purposes of gaining immortality. This mythic framing, however, renders explicitly visible the nature and purpose of the corporate form itself-of capturing and reanimating life in a form of immortality via the mechanisms of perpetual succession. This visual rendering, of a metaphoric framing goes to show the way in which the optical nature of the dominant forms of popular culture-film, television, comic books-provide a means for seeing law's metaphorical images and for thus unpacking, interrogating and rendering them anew. It argues for a shift from the image of the corporation as a monstrous body to one which involves relations of reciprocity, gratuitousness and gift.

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Pieniążek, Marcin. 2015. "The Application of Paul Ricoeur’s Theory in Interpretation of Legal Texts and Legally Relevant Human Action." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 28 (3): 627-646. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9403-3.

internal-pdf://1713258166/Pieniążek-2015-The Application of Paul Ricoeur.pdf.

Pieniazek, Marcin. 2015. "The Application of Paul Ricoeur's Theory in Interpretation of Legal Texts and Legally Relevant Human Action." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 28 (3): 627-646. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9403-3.

ABSTRACT: The article presents possible applications of Paul Ricoeur's theory in interpretation of legal texts and legally relevant human action. One should notice that Paul Ricoeur developed a comprehensive interpretation theory of two seemingly distant phenomena: literary texts and human action. When interrelating these issues, it becomes possible, on the basis of Ricoeur's work, to construct a unified theory of the interpretation of legal texts and of legally relevant human action. What is provided by this theory for jurisprudence is the possibility of formulating a comprehensive theory of application of law, well established in the ontology of the recipient of the legal text. It should be emphasised that the resulting benefits, outlined in the article become particularly noticeable when set against the background of the methodological weaknesses of legal positivism, concerning both the interpretation of law and a syllogistic model of its application.

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Pingel, Isabelle. 2019. "Multilingualism in the Court of justice of the European Union: selected questions." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 32 (2): 449-462. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9586-5.

ABSTRACT: ResumeComme toutes les institutions de l'Union europeenne, la Cour de justice est multilingue et requise de pouvoir s'exprimer dans les 24 langues officielles que compte l'organisation. Pour gerer ce systeme unique au monde, la Cour dispose de services tres competents, de traduction et d'interpretation, dont elle ne cesse d'ameliorer l'efficacite pour fournir un travail de tres haute qualite, dans des delais raisonnables, comme l'exigent les regles de fonctionnement de l'institution judiciaire.

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Piszcz, Anna. 2020. "Anything New Under the Sun? Legal Clarifications as a Polish New Tool for Interpreting Business Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (3): 601-616. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09682-0.

ABSTRACT: The aim of this article is to critically reflect on the Polish transformation taking place in the interpretation of business law in the form of legal clarifications that can be qualified as a soft law guidance. The article attempts to address the following questions: does the new Polish legal framework offer really novel approaches to the interpretation of business law and/or its tools? What are the peculiarities that characterize the new instrument for the interpretation of business law in the form of legal clarifications? What are the pros and cons of legal clarifications? What is the potential practical importance of the introduced interpretation tool, in particular in the context of certain previously existing tools for the interpretation of legal texts? To this end, first, the article sheds light into types of the interpretation of legal texts as well as soft law guidance. Second, it analyses the distinctive features of legal clarifications. Third, it contains the concise comparison of legal clarifications to certain previously existing instruments. In the last part before the conclusion, the topic required an attempt at an assessment. The point of the analysis in this article was both descriptive and normative.

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Piszcz, Anna, and Halina Sierocka. 2020. "The Role of Culture in Legal Languages, Legal Interpretation and Legal Translation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (3): 533-542. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09760-3.

ABSTRACT: The aim of this short essay is to highlight and concisely explore-but not address in depth-some cultural aspects related to legal languages, legal interpretation and legal translation. We would like to consider briefly the following questions: How can elements of legal language, as exemplified by proper names and euphemisms, be connected with cultural (extra-linguistic) factors influencing language units' formation? How can judicial discourse reflect the culture of a given justice system? How can the legal interpretation affect the degree of legal culture? Are theories of legal interpretation universal or applicable to specific legal cultures? What is the impact of culture on the context of legal translation? How can the cultural background affect the decision to use terms in translation? How does cyberculture impact legal translation?

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Piszko, Robert. 2020. "Legitimization and Validity of Directives on Legal Interpretation on the Example of the Rule of Law Crisis in Poland." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09787-6.

ABSTRACT: In case when the criteria for the validity of interpretative directives are not clearly defined and a political dispute arises, the dispute participant may refer to such interpretative directives, the use of which will determine the content of the law and determine the outcome of the political dispute. In this way a crisis of the legal order in Poland has occurred. Therefore, the aim of this article is to draw attention to the consequences of the undefined status of the directives of legal interpretation, the resulting need for legitimacy of the interpretation of the law, the role of legal views (legal doctrine) possible in this respect and the validation role of the interpretation custom in legal doctrine. The article consists of four parts. The first one describes the phenomena that have disrupted the traditional approach to the sources of law. The second part describes the traditional approach to the sources of the law. The third one proves that the traditional approach to the sources of law, in which the main role is fulfilled by normative acts, is incorrect, this part also indicates that the key role in this respect is played by spontaneous rules of law interpretation. The fourth part indicates the need to legitimize the interpretation of the law and the role of the interpretation custom in judicial doctrine. The research material includes parliamentary practice in Poland, practice of law interpretation and scientific studies on law interpretation. The research material was examined mainly using the method of linguistic analysis.

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Poggi, Francesca. 2011. "Law and Conversational Implicatures." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 24 (1): 21-40. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9201-x.

ABSTRACT: This essay investigates the applicability of Grice's theory of conversational implicatures to legal interpretation, in order to highlight some of its characteristics. After introducing the notions of language and discourse, and briefly explaining the most salient aspects of Grice's theory, I will analyse the interpretation of two types of legal acts; authoritative legal acts and acts of private autonomy. Regarding the first class, exemplified by statutes, I will argue against the applicability of Gricean theory due to the conflictual behaviour of the addressees and, above all, to the insurmountable indeterminacy of the contextual elements. As far as acts of private autonomy are concerned, exemplified by contracts, I will argue that the cooperative principle is applicable, at least in those legal systems that include the principle of bona fides among the interpretative regulations of such acts.

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Poggi, Francesca. 2020. "Review Article of Implicatures Within Legal Language." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (4): 1199-1205. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09729-2.

ABSTRACT: The relationship between legal interpretation and ordinary understanding has raised growing interest among legal scholars. According to the mainstream view, law is a communicative phenomenon and, therefore, the best theory of ordinary communication should also explain and guide legal interpretation. Certainly, it is very controversial which theory is the best one, but, even if there are many candidates, Grice's conversation model has attracted a lot of attention. Some legal scholars claim that Grice's theory of conversational maxims should be applied in legal domain, while others dispute this claim. Izabela Skoczen's book, Implicatures within legal language provides an original contribution to this ongoing debate. Through an interdisciplinary approach that engages with the most recent advances in Pragmatics as well as with the most popular legal approaches, Skoczen recasts Grice's theory of conversational implicatures in order to explain the mechanisms behind court decisions. This review article provides a critical examination of Skoczen's book, highlighting its strengths as well as its problems.

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Ponzo, Jenny. 2020. "The Case of the "Offering of Life" in the Causes for Canonization of Catholic Saints: The Threshold of Self-Sacrifice." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (4): 983-1003. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09713-w.

ABSTRACT: Catholic legal and doctrinal tradition defined two main cases for the canonization of saints: until very recently, sainthood was related either to martyrdom or to the heroic practice of virtues, ascertained through a well-defined judicial procedure. In 2017, Pope Francis renewed this ancient tradition by introducing a third case, consisting in the "offering of life", namely the sacrifice of one's life in the name of charity, intended as Christian love for the others. The "offering of life" is placed at the center of an ongoing process of mediation between papal authority, the judicial praxis of the causes for canonization, and ecclesiastic law. The introduction of this new type of sainthood can be explained in light of the growing difficulty to apply the two traditional grids of behavior established by the Church in the evaluation of the life of new kinds of persons who enjoy a widespread fame of sanctity, but are not conform to the strict jurisprudential criteria of martrydrom and heroicity. Therefore, the debate surrounding the "offering of life" entails a dialectics between the necessity of a rationalized set of models, providing precise-and thus evaluable-"narrative programs" (Greimas) and defining a circumscribed number of canonizable human types, and the unprecedented multiplication of instances of sanctity in the contemporary world.

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Prieto Ramos, Fernando. 2015. "Quality Assurance in Legal Translation: Evaluating Process, Competence and Product in the Pursuit of Adequacy." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 28 (1): 11-30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-014-9390-9.

ABSTRACT: Building on a functionalist framework for decision-making in legal translation, a holistic approach to quality is presented in order to respond to the specificities of this field and overcome the shortcomings of general models of translation quality evaluation. The proposed approach connects legal, contextual, macrotextual and microtextual variables for the definition of the translation ade- quacy strategy, which guides problem-solving and the rest of the translation pro- cess. The same parameters remain traceable between the translation brief and the translation product both in pre-delivery (self-)revision and in post-delivery assess- ment. They are the yardstick for identifying predictable evaluative criteria and competence requirements for translators and quality controllers. The implications of the approach on quality assessment (including training contexts) and quality man- agement practices are also discussed. Overall, the model illustrates the potential benefits of enhancing predictability and reducing subjectivity on the basis of specific legal translation methodologies. It supports the need for legal translation expertise in quality evaluation and the relevance of Legal Translation Studies to raising standards in professional practice.

internal-pdf://2511711972/Prieto Ramos-2015-Quality Assurance in Legal T.pdf.

Qu, Wensheng. 2015. "Compilations of Law Dictionaries in New China and Their Roles on Standardization of Translated Legal Terms." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 28 (3): 449-467. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9408-y.

internal-pdf://0719885027/Qu-2015-Compilations of Law Dictionaries in Ne.pdf.

Qu, Wensheng, and Run Li. 2015. "Translation of Personal and Place Names from and into Chinese in Modern China: A Lexicographical History Perspective." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 28 (3): 525-557. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9414-0.

internal-pdf://1869470030/Qu-2015-Translation of Personal and Place Name.pdf.

R. N. Reis, Simone, Andre Reis, Jordi Carrabina, and Pompeu Casanovas. 2019. "Semiotic Aspects in Patent Interpretation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 32 (2): 359-389. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9599-0.

internal-pdf://1869469909/R. N. Reis-2019-Semiotic Aspects in Patent Int.pdf.

Rabault, Hugues. 2008. "Meaning of laws: History of interpreting judicial reasoning." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 21 (2): 175-183. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-008-9075-3.

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Rackeviciene, Sigita, and Liudmila Mockiene. 2020. "Cyber Law Terminology as a New Lexical Field in Legal Discourse." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (3): 673-687. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09690-0.

ABSTRACT: The cyber domain is one of the newest and most rapidly evolving fields of knowledge which has led to the development of a new area of law-cyber law, that regulates the use of the Internet and activities performed over the Internet and other networks. The cyber domain is particularly dynamic: new concepts are constantly developed and need new terminological designations, which in turn need new counterparts in other languages. Formation of these designations and their counterparts often raises terminological issues that are important to deal with in order to develop a coherent system of the cyber domain terms. The given paper focuses on the terminology that includes the lexical item cyber which may be considered as the main signifier of the cyber domain indicating its specific nature. The aim of the paper is threefold: to analyse the origin and development of the lexical item cyber, to investigate conceptual categories of the EU legislation terminology that includes the lexical item cyber and to establish the Lithuanian counterparts that are used for translation of the lexical item cyber in the Lithuanian equivalents of the English terms. For the purposes of the study, the ad hoc English and Lithuanian corpora of the EU legislative documents were compiled. Corpus-driven methodology was used to extract and investigate the terminology used in the corpora. The results of the research are believed to provide useful information to learners and teachers of the legal language and legal translation, as well as drafters of legislative and administrative documents and other professionals engaged in cybersecurity matters.

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Ramos, Fernando Prieto. 2015. "Quality Assurance in Legal Translation: Evaluating Process, Competence and Product in the Pursuit of Adequacy." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 28 (1): 11-30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-014-9390-9.

ABSTRACT: Building on a functionalist framework for decision-making in legal translation, a holistic approach to quality is presented in order to respond to the specificities of this field and overcome the shortcomings of general models of translation quality evaluation. The proposed approach connects legal, contextual, macrotextual and microtextual variables for the definition of the translation adequacy strategy, which guides problem-solving and the rest of the translation process. The same parameters remain traceable between the translation brief and the translation product both in pre-delivery (self-)revision and in post-delivery assessment. They are the yardstick for identifying predictable evaluative criteria and competence requirements for translators and quality controllers. The implications of the approach on quality assessment (including training contexts) and quality management practices are also discussed. Overall, the model illustrates the potential benefits of enhancing predictability and reducing subjectivity on the basis of specific legal translation methodologies. It supports the need for legal translation expertise in quality evaluation and the relevance of Legal Translation Studies to raising standards in professional practice.

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Ravitch, Frank S. 2010. "Arie-Jan Kwak (ed): Holy Writ: Interpreting Law and Religion." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 23 (4): 515-518. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9198-1.

ABSTRACT: Review of Arie-Jan Kwak (ed): Holy Writ: Interpreting Law and Religion. Ashgate Publishing, Surrey, UK, 2009, 204 pp, ISBN 9780754678960

internal-pdf://1947346604/Ravitch-2010-Arie-Jan Kwak (ed)_ Holy Writ_ In.pdf.

Ravitch, Frank S. 2010. "Interpreting Law and Religion." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 23 (4): 515-518. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9198-1.

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Reis, Simone R. N., Andre Reis, Jordi Carrabina, and Pompeu Casanovas. 2019. "Semiotic Aspects in Patent Interpretation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 32 (2): 359-389. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9599-0.

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the semiotic dimension of patent interpretation. Patent documents are at the same time disclosure of information (by the inventors to society) and a granting of rights (by society to the inventors). The claim section expresses the granted rights. In this paper, we view the claims as signs that express the granted rights (mental concept). The semantics to interpret the signs is given by the all-elements rule, as pragmatics. The description and drawings sections of the patent document provide metapragmatics in the form of lexicon and syntax to help the understanding the claims as signs that express the granted rights. This semiotic approach for patent interpretation has important practical consequences to the correct structuring of a patent document. We highlight this contribution through an instance of a patent application in which a claim includes examples of use. Examples are not allowed in the claim text, as examples do not describe the invention, but consist of metapragmatics to better understand the invention. In this way, examples consist of metapragmatics and belong to the description section of the patent, which has the goal to facilitate the understanding of claims (by providing the necessary metapragmatics in the form of lexicon and syntax). In the patent application used to highlight our semiotics approach for patent interpretation, the examples initially presented in the claims were rephrased in the final granted patent, significantly reducing the scope of the claim.

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Reisberg, Liina. 2017. "Gaps in the Law Fulfilled with Meaning: A Semiotic Approach for Decoding Gaps in Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (4): 697-709. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9521-1.

ABSTRACT: Semiotics provides the tools for studying the process of decoding law, one of the most important tasks in the daily work of courts. The semiotic review of juridical interpretation and gap filling concludes that in juridical and semiotic methodology the same question-how a norm is interpreted-is answered from different perspectives. According to the semiotic model proposed in the current paper, juridical interpretation can be structured into three levels: intra-, inter- and supranormative sign-process. For legal theory semiotics can highlight the similarities in the interpretation of norms and gaps. In gap filling the iconic, indexical and symbolic relations compensate for the missing of intranormative semiosis. The applicability of the proposed model is tested on an example of case law. Semiotic investigation of the judgements of Supreme Court of Estonia and European Court of Human Rights shows that semiotics gives a well structured picture of the juridical interpretation process.

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Revesz, Bela. 2020. "Draft for Understanding the Historical Background of Changes in the Ideological Language and Communication of Secret Services in 20th Century's Hungary." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (3): 855-898. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09759-w.

ABSTRACT: Words can mean different things to different people. This can be problematic, mainly for those working together in a bureaucratic institution, such as the secret service. Shared, certified, explicit and codified definitions offer a counter to subjective, solitary and/or culturally dominant definitions. It's true that codified secrecy terms for secret services can be seen to involve a number of political, cultural, subcultural "languages", but if words come from unclassified or declassified files, memorandums and/or records, one needs a deep understanding of the secret services. A remarkable feature of this bureaucratic language is the evolving nature of, certain "keywords" as important signifiers of historical transformation. Thus, the changes in the language of the secret services depends at least as much on the internal changes of the secret services as on the transformation in the external political-social environment. In spite of the confusion of Hungarian secret services in the revolutions of 1918-1919 and the disintegration of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, in the early 1920's became a stable system. Between the two World Wars, the Hungarian State Police directed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (hereinafter referred to as MIA), the Military Intelligence and Counter-Espionage directed by the Ministry of Defence (hereinafter referred to as MoD), and the Hungarian Royal Gendarmerie directed by both of the Ministries had their own operational service. This structure existed unchanged until 1945. Simultaneously with the forward advance of the soviet troops, government began to re-establish the former system of the secret services in the eastern part of the country. After WWII, in 1946, the "State-protection Department" as political police became independent from the police. However, from the beginning, they remained under the control of the Communist Party. After 1950, the State Security Authority provided special services for the MIA and the Military Political Directorate of the MoD. After quashing the revolution in 1956, in the spring of 1957, the MIA Political Investigation Department was established which-with slight modifications-kept the structure created during the "state protection era". The MIA III. The State-Protection General Directorate was established in 1962. The reorganization was finalized in the middle of the 1960's, which resulted in the new system, which-with the structure of Directorates-became the ultimate structure of the state secret police until the abolishment of the MIA General Directorate III in January 1990. These organizational transformations were largely the result of exogenous historical-political changes. Moreover, each new period had a major impact on the organizational communication, language use and vocabulary of the secret services. This study seeks to interpret these historical transformations.

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Ricca, Mario. 2018. "Ignorantia Facti Excusat: Legal Liability and the Intercultural Significance of Greimas' "Contrat de V,ridition"." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 31 (1): 101-126. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9529-6.

ABSTRACT: This essay addresses the relationships between prescription and description in legal rules. The analysis will focus on the culture-laden connotations of factual categories implied in all legal sentences and/or provisions. This investigation is spurred by the need to assess the impact of cultural difference in people's understanding of legal imperatives and, symmetrically, how that impact is to be considered in the application of law. Differences in ways of categorizing the world could position the cultural pre-understanding required by law, and the pluralism recognized and protected by constitutional principles and human/fundamental rights discourse, at a crossroads. Hence, even when we find an illegitimacy or an ignorance about what legal rules do not explicitly state but instead implicitly presuppose, this does not exclude that behind that ignorance there may be something worthy of legal protection. A question emerges: is it legitimate and reasonable to consider the ignorantia facti resulting from differing ways of categorizing the factual world as automatically and uncritically subject to the principle ignoratia legis non excusat? The essay continues with an assessment of the possible consequences of ignorantia facti in the administration of justice in multicultural societies and migration contexts. For this purpose, the opportunity for an intercultural use of law-including within national law-will be considered as a means of avoiding the discriminatory application of ignorantia facti. This topic will be addressed by leveraging both semiotic and cultural-anthropological analytical tools, including the well-known greimasien "contrat de v,ridiction".

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Ricca, Mario. 2020. "Perpetually Astride Eden's Boundaries: The Limits to the 'Limits of Law' and the Semiotic Inconsistency of 'Legal Enclosures'." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09771-0.

ABSTRACT: Legal systems can be metaphorically taken as semantic and pragmatic enclosures. The ancient world has given us at least three literary loci that display the self-disruptive significance of this kind of metaphor if assumed as a practical guideline in the attempt to steer human experience. The first such loci can be traced in biblical Eden; the second one in the Phaeacian garden described in Homer's Odyssey; the third in the stories of the first and second mythical Athens included in Plato'sTimaeusandRepublic. In all these tales, human beings ineluctably end up straying across the semantic-spatial borders which certain categories and rules have given them to encompass their experience. All these literary loci offer both a semio-cognitive and a constitutional lesson for lawyers and sovereigns. My intention is to exploit these lessons to show that the most relevant limit of legal systems, if taken as semantic and pragmatic enclosures, consists precisely in their inability to constitutively limit themselves and their semiotic borders. This inaptitude is due, in my view, to the semiotic 'exceedance' of the phrastic, or descriptive parts of legal rules even more than the semantic vagueness of the values underlying their legitimacy. Any attempt to define the semantic and spatial boundaries of human experience by means of verbal enunciations implies the use of categorical schemes to define the legitimate and/or forbidden behaviors. But categorical schemes, in turn, comprise boundaries that draw protean verges between the inside and the outside of each category. The categorical 'inside' compellingly tends to exceed its borders so as to protrude out toward what is outside the category. In turn, the 'outside' shows, more often than not, continuities with the axiological/teleological patterns underpinning the semantic boundaries of legal rules. Any attempt to limit the competence/extension of law, if taken in its semantic/spatial significance, would seem to unveil what law could or should be, but is not. Relying on the above literary loci, I will try to demonstrate that this apparently contradictory implication is inherent in the dialectic between equality/universality and difference/plurality that makes up categorization itself, and thereby the semiotic prerequisites to considering any legal rule.

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Ricca, Mario. 2020. "Planning Facts Through Law: Legal Reasonableness as Creative Indexicality and Trans-categorical Re-configuration." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (4): 1089-1123. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09702-z.

ABSTRACT: Legal reasonableness and its theoretical analysis are often gauged on judicial activity. However, the judicial exercise of reasonableness is always a post-factum activity. People produce facts, and then courts are called to ascertain and qualify their conduct to determine its legal consequences. The use of reasonableness appears, in this way, almost inherently grafted onto a pre-existing divide between facts and legal rules. Reasonableness would appear to be mainly engaged in the balancing of the semantic spectrums of law's provisions and their underlying axiological legitimations. To put it diversely, reasonableness seems to be confined within the semantic fluctuations of a major premise of syllogism and only indirectly focused on its minor premise and the translation of facts in legal terms. I think this traditional approach is defective. Its defectiveness is due, in my view, to a lack of semiotic awareness in the assumptions made by judges about what facts are and the resulting tendency to produce ossified understandings. If, instead, legal interpreters were to consider facts as epitomes of signical chains that are thus open to a narrative unwinding, the categorization of facts and the creative remolding of the semantic spectrum of legal enunciations would reveal their interpenetration. Narrations make visible the implicit deictic dimension inherent in the symbolic representation of facts and actions, as well as the signical webs in which such empirical 'data' are embedded. These expanded landscapes of multifarious properties and connotations-if traversed far and wide by the interpreters-tend to proffer new and unexpected axes of semantic/legal qualification. This is because the newly emerging properties are often pertinent to various phrastic parts of different legal enunciations (and the lexemes they comprise, as well), thereby urging a renewed assessment of their categorical borders and criteria of trans-categorical relevance. In this sense, reasonableness can function as a chisel to proactively mold the world of experience rather than as a rhetorical device that is only applied to previously defined rules and empirical categories. Indeed, this is exactly what occurs, even more intensively, when legal practitioners provide legal assistance to their clients before and outside the courts. In many cases, when clients are informed about the legal consequences of their actions, they undertake-even if unawares-a semiotic/indexical re-assessment of their potential conduct; they re-plan the factual/behavioral chains designed to pursue their interests and achieve their ends. In this way, they become able to produce facts through law. If taken together, legal education, a semiotic understanding of facts, and a widespread use of pre-litigation legal assistance might cast new light on the potentialities of legal experience, if not its own socio-political and even cognitive significance. From this angle, therefore, improving the semiotic analysis of the life of law is a crucial step on the path toward new ways of rethinking the relationships between legal discourse and the making of the social world.

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Ricca, Mario. 2020. "Don't Uncover that Face! Covid-19 Masks and the Niqab: Ironic Transfigurations of the ECtHR's Intercultural Blindness." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique: 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09703-y. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33214731.

ABSTRACT: This essay, between serious and facetious, addresses an apparently secondary implication of the planetary tragedy produced by Covid-19. It coincides with the 'problem of the veil,' a bone of contention in Islam/West relationships. More specifically, it will address the question of why the pandemic has changed the proxemics of public spaces and the grammar of 'living together.' For some time-and it is not possible to foresee how much-in many countries people cannot go out, or enter any public places, without wearing a sanitary mask. In short, almost all of us, by obligation or by urgent advice from the public authorities of the various countries, will not live the public sphere with our faces uncovered. The alteration of the social context affecting many Western countries will inevitably involve also the 'local' perception of the Islamic veil and-as a matter of equality-the consistency of the prohibition of wearing it. What will thus become of the ban on wearing it in public places established by some countries such as France and asseverated by the ECHR? If everyone can and will have to go around with their faces covered, why should only Islamic women be discriminated against? Will not the change in boundary conditions produced by Covid-19 also induce Western people to re-categorize the meaning of the veil? And will this re-categorization not directly affect the 'fact' of wearing the veil, that is, its empirical perception? And still, will this psycho-semantic change not show how empirical perceptions are cultural constructs rather than 'objective facts,' as such allegedly independent from the observer's point of view? Consequentially, will the plurality of perceptions and cultural meanings related to the gesture of covering one's own face not gain renewed relevance in determining the legitimacy of wearing the veil? The socio-semantic earthquake produced by Covid-19 compels us to rethink this and other issues orbiting around the translation of 'facts' into legal language; furthermore, it highlights the instrumentality of many ideological/partisan and ethnocentric assumptions passed off as objectivity regarding those alleged 'facts.' The essay will attempt to provide an answer to the above questions by proposing a semiotic-legal approach to intercultural conflicts and, indirectly, the pluralism in law.

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Richard, Isabelle. 2013. "Fidelity in legal translation: Translation Strategies, English to the French, real and fake friends." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (3): 651-671. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9279-4.

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Ricoeur, P. 1990. "Between Hermeneutics and Semiotics." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 3 (8): 115-132. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01130220.

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Salter, Michael. 2013. "Carl Schmitt on the Secularisation of Religious Texts as a Resacralisation of Jurisprudence?" International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (1): 113-147. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9265-x.

ABSTRACT: Carl Schmitt, an increasingly influential German law professor, developed a provocative and historically oriented model of "political theology'' with specific relevance to legal scholarship and the authorship of constitutional texts. His "political theology'' is best understood neither as an expressly theological discourse within constitutional law, nor as a uniquely legal discourse shaped by a hidden theological agenda. Instead, it addresses the possibility of the continual resurfacing of theological ideas and beliefs within legal discourses of, for instance, sovereignty, the force of law and states of emergency (or "exception'') that present themselves as relentlessly secular, even-in the case of Kelsenian jurisprudence-''scientific''. This article illustrates and then critically evaluates Schmitt's theory in terms of the authorship of constitutional texts in particular. It includes two case studies-genocidal colonial land appropriation and Kelsenian positivism in order to illustrate aspects of his political theology. Whilst Schmitt is defended against reductionist interpretations, I show that there remains considerable unfinished business before a Schmittian approach to legal theory merits full acceptance.

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Scott, W. T. 1990. "Candor, Euphemism and the Professional-Client Relationship." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 3 (9): 255-272. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01130329.

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Secomb, Linnell. 2010. "Derrida's Other Ends of Man." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 23 (3): 299-313. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9155-z.

ABSTRACT: In 'Force of law' Derrida appears to suggest that emancipatory ideals and human rights have a continuing relevance. This may seem a surprising proposition from a theorist often interpreted as critical of humanist and Enlightenment principles. This paper argues, however, that Derrida does not reject, outright, humanist, Enlightenment and emancipatory strategies but instead deconstructs these in order to propose alternate 'ethical' and 'political' possibilities. Focusing on 'The ends of man', 'Force of law' and 'Autoimmunity' this paper argues that Derrida does not advocate an anti-humanism but instead gestures toward an alternate unconditional hospitality, responsibility, friendship, justice and democracy-to-come, displacing the anthropomorphism of humanism and advocating instead an openness to a heterogeneous otherness.

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Shah, Mustafa. 2016. "The Case of variae lectiones in Classical Islamic Jurisprudence: Grammar and the Interpretation of Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 29 (2): 285-311. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9461-1.

ABSTRACT: The qir (a) over bar'(a) over bart or variae lectiones represent the vast corpus of Qur'anic readings that were preserved through the historical processes associated with the textual codification and transmission of the Qur'an. Despite the fact that differences among concomitant readings tend to be nominal, others betray semantic nuances that are brought into play within legal discourses. Both types of readings remain important sources for the history of the text of the Qur'an and early Arabic grammatical thought. While some recent scholars have questioned the historical function and nature of the corpus of qira'at, others have argued that specific types of variant readings were the resultant products of attempts to circumvent legal inconsistencies which were found in text of the Qur'an or were generated through legal debates. Following a preliminary review of the historical framework of the genesis of qiraat through reference to early grammatical literature, an attempt will be made to shed some light on the role that semantic variation among concomitant readings played in the synthesis and interpretation of law. The aim will be to draw attention to the subtle theoretical frameworks employed by jurists for their contextualization and analysis. This will also include a review of attitudes towards the forms of qiraat that classical scholarship designated as being anomalous or shadhdha.

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Shaw, Julia J. A. 2012. "The Continuing Relevance of Ars Poetica to Legal Scholarship and the Modern Lawyer." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 25 (1): 71-93. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9214-5.

ABSTRACT: In this late modern era within which the basic values of life have been reordered (driven by globalisation, the corporate agenda and mass communication technologies), the individual has effectively been reduced to a mere abstraction. It might be argued that the rational, moral and humanistic concept of freedom has, to a great extent, been compromised by a consequent crisis within the intelligentsia. These groups, in particular the gatekeepers of a classical liberal approach to legal scholarship, are caught between the twin evils of increased unreflective populism and pragmatism evident within many law schools and modern legal institutions. Although a contested term, defenders of the 'socio-legal' tradition, who place the humanities at the heart of legal research and education, are obliged to restate with increased determination the utility of the liberal arts and literature to the law profession and wider legal community. In a normative environment, law and narrative are inextricably linked and narrative poetry is not only invaluable to explaining the origins and location of the legal tradition, but also elicits a mode of understanding which transcends the boundaries of narrowlydefined legal hermeneutics-which often only addresses issues of an operational nature. French novelist Flaubert claimed "chaque notaire porte en soi les debris d'un poete'' (Flaubert in Madame bovary (trans: Wall, G.), Penguin Classics, London, 1960: 269), paraphrased by American civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow, as "inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet'' (Lukas in Big trouble: a murder in a small western town sets off a struggle for the soul of America, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997: 323). In an age of disenchantment, this paper explores the poetic form as an important medium within which to understand the nature and function of law in a society of differentiated individuals.

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Shaw, Julia J. A. 2013. "A Study of the Semiotic and Narrative Forms of Divine Influence Within Secular Legal Systems." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (1): 95-112. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9266-9.

ABSTRACT: Since the Reformation and Enlightenment, the Western world has witnessed the incremental decline of religious influence. Yet, key legal protections and duties incumbent on civilians and state actors in both avowedly secular states and ruling theocracies, predominantly Islamic, are to a lesser or greater extent determined by religious values. Although it is often claimed that the modern secular state encourages the adoption of liberal values and allows for the formulation of general law according to the free will of its people, the historical legacy of law and particularly its synthesis with the Judeo-Christian heritage is apparent. In the UK, the continuing centrality of religion in what purports to be a secular system of laws, is demonstrated by the introduction of elements of Sharia law. In an increasingly culturally-diverse society, the recognition of Islamic law may be interpreted as the tacit acknowledgement of the existing inherent faith influences which continue to inform many legal innovations, and represents an explicit attempt to rebalance the privileging of one set of precepts above another. It is suggested that religion continues to occupy a central position in lawmaking; performing a cultural, political, institutional and, importantly, symbolic role and this is evidenced for instance by the narratives which are imposed on individuals in relation to areas of topical significance such as matrimony, terminal illness, abortion, gender and sexual morality. This paper argues against those pronouncements of the retreat of religion in state affairs and, rather, reveals a set of key structural relations and signifiers which are informed by opinions redolent of, not least of all, a peculiar generic proscriptive religiosity.

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Shudo, Sachiko. 2019. "How to Translate Apology and Non-apology in Legal Contexts: A Linguistic Analysis of Potentially Serious “Subtle Mistranslation” in Japan." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 32 (4): 795-817. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09643-2.

internal-pdf://3287384915/Shudo-2019-How to Translate Apology and Non-ap.pdf.

Simoes Gaudencio, Ana Margarida. 2020. ""Jurisdictional Realization of Law" as Judicium: A Methodological Alternative, Beyond Deductive Application and Finalistic Decision." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (1): 133-146. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09668-7.

ABSTRACT: The proposed reflection intends to present the problem of judicial adjudication as a substantially-axiologically founded autonomous moment on the practical realization of law, and to explore this understanding in confrontation with external exigencies, mostly teleologically determined-hence, beyond strict deductive application, as a (normativistic-positivistic) syllogistic reference of facts to norms, and finalistically determined decision, as an option among possible alternatives to achieve specific aims. The main objective is to enter into a discussion on the methodological meaning of "integrity", "hard cases" and "right answer", as presented by Ronald Dworkin, and a critical reflection on the criticism(s) of that approach levelled by Neil MacCormick, so as to confront the relevance of principle and policy arguments, in order to bring about a different methodological approach, an alternative jurisprudentialist conception of adjudication, incorporating a practical-normative constitutive dialectics between legal controversy and legal system, such as that presented by Castanheira Neves. The focus will, then, be the legitimacy of the connection of arguments of principle and consequentialist arguments in adjudication, its selection and its justification, stating, therefore, a specifically assumed judicium, a judicative decision, having the legal system as its horizon of normative reference and of substantial and institutional autonomy.

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Sin, King Kui. 2013. "Out of the Fly-Bottle: Conceptual Confusions in Multilingual Legislation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 26 (4): 927-951. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-013-9313-1.

ABSTRACT: Conceptual confusions permeate all forms of intellectual pursuit. Many have contended that multilingual legislation, i.e., one law enacted in different languages, is unviable when carried out by means of translation. But not many have realized that the same would also be true of drafting if their contention could be justified. My involvement in the translation of Hong Kong laws into Chinese in the run-up to 1997 exposed me to a whole world of myths and misconceptions about legal translation arising from our failure to command a clear view of the workings of language. Over the years I have endeavoured to come to grips with the problems inherent in legal translation, showing that the arguments against the possibility of exact translation, against the possibility of achieving equivalence between different language texts of the law, and against the possibility of bridging the conceptual gap between legal terminologies in different languages, are all ill-grounded and mis- guided. There are indeed enormous difficulties in drafting and translating multilingual law, but they are essentially of a technical nature, by no means theo- retically irresolvable. The viability of multilingual legislation is simply grounded in our innate communicative intention to use signs and symbols to convey meaning. As language users, we are capable of making language work for us for any par- ticular purpose. Just as we can translate the rules of chess from one language to another whereby players speaking different languages can play the same game called “chess”, we don’t see why we can’t do the same with multilingual legislation. The door has always been open!

internal-pdf://2426206275/Sin-2013-Out of the Fly-Bottle_ Conceptual Con.pdf.

Skinner, Stephen. 2013. "Violence in Fascist Criminal Law Discourse: War, Repression and Anti-Democracy." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (2): 439-458. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9296-3.

ABSTRACT: This article constructs a critical historical, political and theoretical analysis of the essence of Fascist criminal law discourse in terms of the violence that shaped and characterised it. The article examines the significance of violence in key declarations about the role and purpose of criminal law by Alfredo Rocco, Fascist Minister of Justice and leading ideologue, in his principal speech on the final draft of the 1930 Italian Penal Code. It is grounded on the premise that criminal law is particularly significant for understanding the relationship between State power and individuals, and so what was distinctive about Fascist thinking in this regard. The article analyses Rocco's declarations as a discourse in order to highlight their contextual foundations, construction and ideological connections. It argues that the core theme of that discourse is violence, which has three principal dimensions: a close historical and rhetorical connection with war, a focus on repressive and intimidatory force, and a paramount concern with subordinating individuals to State interests. The article then uses this analysis to develop a theoretical reading of the nexus between criminal law and violence in Fascism, in terms of its foundations and reversal of ends and means. The article thus provides an original perspective on Fascism and criminal law, which it argues is important for critical engagement with criminal law discourse in our democracies today.

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Skoczen, Izabela. 2016. "Minimal Semantics and Legal Interpretation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 29 (3): 615-633. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9448-3.

ABSTRACT: In this paper I will tackle three issues. First, I aim to briefly outline the backbone of semantic minimalism, while focusing on the idea of 'liberal truth conditions' developed by Emma Borg in her book 'Minimal Semantics'. Secondly, I will provide an account of the three principal views in legal interpretation: intentionalism, textualism and purposivism. All of them are based on a common denominator labelled by lawyers 'literal meaning'. In the paper I suggest a novel way of viewing this common denominator as almost identical to the Borgian 'liberal truth conditions', at least at a conceptual level. In the third section I will focus on the conceptual similarities between the two ideas. I intend to depict that, although legal theorists do not admit it explicitly, they treat literal legal meaning as minimal propositional content that can be ascribed liberal truth conditions. There are two main objections to liberal truth conditions: their under-determinacy and unintuitive character. Both objections can be applied to 'literal meaning'. However, the idea of liberal truth conditions gives an adequate account of what lawyers call literal meaning and is helpful in explaining the mechanism of understanding of provisions and reasons leading to the necessity of statutory interpretation.

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Skoll, Geoffrey R. 2007. "Meanings of Terrorism." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 20 (2): 107-127. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-006-9038-5.

ABSTRACT: Terrorism is a notoriously plastic word, depending on user, audience, and political context. This paper focuses on shifts in its meanings since the early 1970s. As federal statutes made terrorism a criminal offense, common usage changed from a broad meaning to one that specified terrorism as a political crime. The argument is that the state shapes meaning and public discourse through law. Peir cean semiotics and the semiotic philosophy of Russian linguist Volos. inov provide a framework to explore relationships among politics, law, and civil life. Applied to the events of September 11, 2001 such an analysis further allows better understanding of certain interpreters of the September 11 attacks, notably Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Jurgen Habermas.

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Skop, Martin. 2020. "Narratives as the Cultural Context of Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (1): 101-111. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09665-w.

ABSTRACT: Law can be characterised as a highly specialized tool with strong social impact requiring social legitimization and acceptance. Law is also specific, abstract world. World that needs words to exist. To understand law and to share its content it is important to focus on narratives related to it. The article deals with the importance of narration in law as the consequence of discursive peculiarity of law and its dependence on the acceptance of societies. Law is culturally conditioned, and by means of narrative can combine the expectations of society concerning legitimation with legal rationality. The law cannot function exclusively as an abstract and formal structure nor an administrative apparatus, with own ways of legitimization or justification. Through social acceptance law gains its real form, but at the same time it is subordinated to cultural patterns. Changes in narratives change the law and then the real world. The article shows possible ways of analysis of narratives, narrative strategies and forms that are present in law.

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Soboleva, Anita. 2013. "Use and Misuse of Language in Judicial Decision-Making: Russian Experience." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (3): 673-692. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9270-0.

ABSTRACT: In my paper I will analyze decisions of the Russian Constitutional Court and courts of general jurisdiction, in which they interpret ordinary and seemingly unambiguous words and phrases. In a number of cases this interpretation is made in a manner, which is suspect from a linguistic point of view. The analysis shows that there is no consistency in the application by Russian courts of the "plain language'' rule and that literal interpretation may be used selectively as a means of legitimizing the decisions made on non-linguistic grounds. Though literal interpretation can be often incompatible with the concept of justice and therefore judges should also take into account other criteria, there are examples of court decisions, in which literal interpretation would have been more appropriate from the perspective of justice, separation of powers and human rights. The article shows how use and misuse of language by judges is employed as a tool in judicial decision-making.

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Soboleva, Anita. 2016. "Judges as Readers, Authors and Dialecticians: Legal Interpretation in the ECtHR Cases on Mental Disability." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 29 (3): 557-575. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9442-9.

ABSTRACT: The wording of major human rights texts-constitutions and international treaties-is very similar in those provisions, which guarantee everyone the right to family, privacy, protection against discrimination and arbitrary detention, and the right to access the court. However, judges of lower national courts, constitutional judges and judges of the European Court of Human Rights often read the same or seemingly the same texts differently. This difference in interpretation gives rise not only to disputes about the hierarchy of interpretative authorities, but to more general disputes about limits of judicial construction and validity of legal arguments. How it may happen, that the national courts, which apply constitutional provisions or provisions of national legislative acts, which are seemingly in compliance with the international human rights standards, come to different results with the international judges? Do they employ different interpretative techniques, share different values or develop different legal concepts? Do international judges 'write' rather than 'read' the text of the Convention? Who is, in Plato's terms, a name-giver and who has a power to define the 'correctness' of names? The answers to these questions from the rhetorical and semiotic perspectives are exemplified by the texts of the judicial decisions on the rights of persons with mental disabilities.

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Solan, Lawrence. 2020. "Corpus Linguistics as a Method of Legal Interpretation: Some Progress, Some Questions." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 33 (2).

ABSTRACT: Corpus linguistics is becoming a respected method of statutory and constitutional interpretation in the United States over the past decade, yet it has also generated a backlash from a group of scholars that engage in empirical work. This essay attempts to demonstrate both the contributions and the risks of using linguistic corpora as a primary tool in legal interpretation. Its legitimacy stems from the fact that courts routinely state that statutory terms, when not defined as a matter of law, are to be given their ordinary meaning. Judges have responded to this challenge, with the assistance of the linguistics community, by using corpora to determine which meanings are ordinary. However, legal analysts have not determined exactly what makes one meaning ordinary and another not ordinary. This gap has led to a level of disagreement in the field. Moreover, while linguists who engage in corpus linguistic analysis typically emphasize the importance of context, the legal application is peculiarly context-free, in keeping with legal philosophies that eschew reliance on reference to a law’s purpose and the intent of the legislature that enacted it. This move adds a political dimension to corpus analysis as a means of legal interpretation. Yet, the article concludes that by relying on a blend of general and specialized corpora, the legal system can substantially reduce the problem of contextualization, as some linguists and practitioners have already recognized.

internal-pdf://2383132683/03 Solan.docx.

Solan, Lawrence M. 2020. "Corpus Linguistics as a Method of Legal Interpretation: Some Progress, Some Questions." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (2): 283-298. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09707-8.

ABSTRACT: Corpus linguistics is becoming a respected method of statutory and constitutional interpretation in the United States over the past decade, yet it has also generated a backlash from a group of scholars that engage in empirical work. This essay attempts to demonstrate both the contributions and the risks of using linguistic corpora as a primary tool in legal interpretation. Its legitimacy stems from the fact that courts routinely state that statutory terms, when not defined as a matter of law, are to be given their ordinary meaning. Judges have responded to this challenge, with the assistance of the linguistics community, by using corpora to determine which meanings are ordinary. However, legal analysts have not determined exactly what makes one meaning ordinary and another not ordinary. This gap has led to a level of disagreement in the field. Moreover, while linguists who engage in corpus linguistic analysis typically emphasize the importance of context, the legal application is peculiarly context-free, in keeping with legal philosophies that eschew reliance on reference to a law's purpose and the intent of the legislature that enacted it. This move adds a political dimension to corpus analysis as a means of legal interpretation. Yet, the article concludes that by relying on a blend of general and specialized corpora, the legal system can substantially reduce the problem of contextualization, as some linguists and practitioners have already recognized.

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Sourioux, Jean-Louis. 2012. "Le Juriste en Présence de L’herméneutique Contemporaine." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 26 (4): 761-765. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9294-5.

ABSTRACT: Philosophical hermeneutics developed by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and founded on interpretation as explicit form of compre- hension generated a debate on contemporary hermeneutics about texts written at different periods of time from those in which they must then be applied. This debate is necessarily very instructive for the jurist when he interprets texts and creates positive law to produce a determined effect on recipients. Comprehension as par- ticipation in truth involves questioning and an interpretation devoid of prejudices. Illustration of hermeneutics in law demonstrates that interpretation related to comprehension is strictly bound to the question of application bearing in mind that application does not only consist in concretizing comprehension, it constitutes his nucleus. It follows that hermeneutics oscillates between a theoretical and practical meaning. Regarding the concept of a presumption it is perceived as an instrumental necessity and a necessary corollary of interpretation in that it anticipates on the meaning found on the possibility. It is specified in a context of legal hermeneutics that it is necessary to distinguish the interpretation of the observer from the one of the player such the judge put in the performative position.

internal-pdf://1573363352/Sourioux-2012-Le Juriste en Présence de L’herm.pdf.

Stawecki, Tomasz. 2012. "Autonomous Constitutional Interpretation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 25 (4): 505-535. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-011-9243-8.

ABSTRACT: Certain works in the most recent Polish constitutional law literature suggest that there is acceptance of the principle or the concept of autonomous interpretation of a constitution (autonomy of interpretation of constitutional terms). The Constitutional Tribunal also makes reference to this in numerous rulings. Paradoxically, however, that concept is not very popular in legal theory. It might seem that Polish legal theoreticians and philosophers do not appreciate the concept of interpretation of a constitution devised through practice with the support of constitutional law doctrine. It might, however, mean that opinions on autonomous interpretation of Polish Constitution are nothing more than rhetorical arguments formulated ad hoc not a coherent concept or a theory. This text is an attempt to analyse this concept and its potential in discussions surrounding application of the Polish Constitution.

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Stepien, Mateusz. 2019. "Say it with Images: Drawing on Jerome Frank's Ideas on Judicial Decision Making." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 32 (2): 321-334. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09606-7.

ABSTRACT: This paper aims to shed light on the putative functions of placing images in judicial opinions from the judges' perspective. Thus far, commentators have overlooked the functions that images play for judges when used in judicial opinions and consequently have failed to provide a thorough understanding of the process. To help fill this gap, Jerome Frank's ideas on judging will be presented. The argument goes that using images in judicial opinions can be interpreted as a way to enable the decision-making process to be, as far as possible, devoid of hypocrisy, closer to judicial candor and more open to scrutiny. This notion can be excavated from Frank's works in light of the existential features of both passing judgments and articulating decision-making processes by and for judges themselves. As will be shown, Frank's views on judicial decision-making are more original and enlightening than critics might suggest and they are particularly relevant when examining the use of images in judicial opinions from a judge's perspective.

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Stoehrel, Rodrigo Ferrada. 2013. "The Legal Image's Forgotten Aesthetics." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (3): 555-577. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9280-y.

ABSTRACT: Aesthetics and communications theories are often applied to art, media and popular culture but not within legal empirical (audiovisual) material-despite the fact that a judicial and legal process comprises a palpable utilisation of the visual as evidence of an historical reality. Based on four distinct Swedish cases, this study analyses the court's reasoning, interpretation and use of (audio) visual evidence. Inspired by an embodied film theory, Benjamin's thoughts on the technical-dramaturgical components of the camera and the later Barthes' notion of the 'punctum', the article discusses how (audio) visual evidence cannot be disconnected from affective and aesthetic significances that ultimately can be taken to affect the perception of truth and (the crime's) reality. The gap between theory and practice is debated and argued as beginning to co-exist; instead of seeing (visual) theory and (judicial) practice as a dichotomy, an attempt should be made for a conversation between seemingly different but in practice related areas of knowledge. The author's aim is to suggest that photographic and filmic evidence has a particular significance in itself, which means that the relation between (judicial) interpretation and outcome should be considered within an affective and aesthetic dimension, rather than being placed and/or theorized outside of it.

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Strickland, Aaron. 2016. "Poetic Justice: An Interpretation of Lawyers' Reactions to Verse Judgments." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 29 (3): 643-666. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9451-8.

ABSTRACT: This article offers an interpretation of lawyers' reactions to verse judgments, being judicial decisions rendered in rhymed poetry form. While, in recent history, there has been an unexplained break in the close historical connection between poetry and law, some judges nevertheless continue to render their judicial decisions in verse. This has met strong criticism from fellow judges, inevitably, but also from lawyers. However, there is no evidence in academic writing of anyone attempting to explain why lawyers are having these reactions. Endeavouring to fill that void, this research employs hermeneutics to offer an interpretation of lawyers' reactions to verse judgments. The article analyses the varied opinions uncovered in five qualitative interviews with lawyers of different backgrounds, and contends that a movement of poetry back towards its utilitarian origins would see lawyers change their reaction to verse judgments, instead viewing them as an appropriate form of judicial expression.

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Swiffen, Amy. 2016. "The Hermeneutics of Jurisdiction in a Public Health Emergency in Canada." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 29 (3): 667-684. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9453-6.

ABSTRACT: This paper investigates the state of the law in Canada in regards to a public health emergency, and in particular the jurisdictional logic that might come into effect were a public health emergency to occur. Although there has yet to be a national public health emergency in Canada, threats of such crises are likely to arise in the future. It is therefore recognised as necessary to address Canada's legal preparedness for a public health emergency and evaluate proposed reforms to the legal structure that could facilitate response. This paper contributes to this goal by identifying multiple jurisdictional factors that could inform legal interpretations in a public health emergency. It considers how the legal system and the courts are dealing with public health as a national security issue (political and collective matter) while taking into account s. 7 of the Canadian Charter (individual rights). It also looks at the power of the government defined in the Emergencies Act [1985, c. 22] and a proposed legal reform that would make it easier for the government to act unilaterally in a public health emergency. The paper draws on the legal theory of Robert Cover to analyse the hermeneutics of jurisdiction that characterise legal interpretations of public health in Canada, as well as the relationship between jurisdiction and legal violence that these hermeneutics imply. It then develops a case study of the use of medical triage in a public health emergency to explore the possibility of holding the state liable under private law for harm caused to individuals by public health decisions. The paper concludes by suggesting that the state's public health power can be conceptualised as a form of legal violence and that the courts in Canada should adopt a jurisgenerative approach to legal interpretation in the area of public health.

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Sykes, Robbie. 2018. "Listening Back: Music, Cultural Heritage and Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 31 (2): 183-186. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9552-2.

ABSTRACT: As a performative activity, music has the potential to help explain the interpretive and rhetorical work of lawyering. As an aesthetic creation that reflects and shapes individual identities and social bonds, music is a cultural force that may contest or enhance political and legal power. The papers in this special issue contribute to the expanding field that pairs law and music by examining how music has affected legal practices and legal thinking in particular historical and cultural instances.

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Sykes, Robbie, and Kieran Tranter. 2018. "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and Natural Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 31 (2): 325-347. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9542-4.

ABSTRACT: In Natural Law and Natural Rights, John Finnis delves into the past, attempting to revitalise the Thomist natural law tradition cut short by opposing philosophers such as David Hume. In this article, Finnis's efforts at revival are assessed by way of comparison with-and, indeed, contrast to-the life and art of musician David Bowie. In spite of their extravagant differences, there exist significant points of connection that allow Bowie to be used in interpreting Finnis's natural law. Bowie's work-for all its appeals to a Nietzschean ground zero for normative values-shares Finnis's concern with ordering affairs in a way that will realise humanity's great potential. In presenting enchanted worlds and evolved characters as an antidote to all that is drab and pointless, Bowie has something to tell his audience about how human beings can thrive. Likewise, natural law holds that a legal system should include certain content that guides people towards a life of "flourishing". Bowie and Finnis look to the past, plundering it for inspiration and using it as fuel to boost humankind forward. The analogy of Natural Law and Natural Rights and Bowie's magpie-like relationship to various popular music traditions ultimately reveals that natural law theory is not merely an objective and unchanging edict to be followed without question, but a legacy that is to be recreated by those who carry it into the future. Law's instruments of critique must not forget these transformative qualities.

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Taira, Eiji, and Shizuka Itagaki. 2019. "How Hearing People Understand the Deaf and Some Legal Implications of Their Misinterpretation of Visual Expressions." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 32 (4): 819-829. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09644-1.

ABSTRACT: While the complexities of interpreting in constrained legal contexts such as trials may gradually be getting better understood by legal professionals, the particular difficulties of interpreting for the Deaf remain largely overlooked, and the recent involvement of citizen judges in Japan’s justice system makes it even more important to raise awareness about this aspect of language disadvantage. This paper focuses on a key feature of Japanese Sign Language: the non-manual markers produced by facial and body movements that accompany hand and finger signs. Research shows such markers to be poorly understood by non-Deaf observers and indeed even sign language interpreters sometimes conflate them with gestures used by hearing people.

internal-pdf://1065311564/Taira-2019-How Hearing People Understand the D.pdf.

Takacs, Peter. 2020. "Renaming States-A Case Study: Changing the Name of the Hungarian State in 2011. Its Background, Reasons, and Aftermath." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (3): 899-927. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09692-y.

ABSTRACT: A provision of the Hungarian constitution, adopted in 2011, has renamed the state. The name changed from the Republic of Hungary to Hungary, while the form of the state has remained "republic". The purpose of this study is to explore the meaning, significance, and several consequences of this provision. The analysis consists of three main parts. The first one gives a general overview of the functions of the names of states. It claims that not only names but also changing or modifying names of states-taking place either by name-giving or by shaping convention-can serve certain functions. The second part focuses on the historical and constitutional details of renaming the Hungarian state, and summarizes the legal context that provided the framework for the 2011 renaming. The third part outlines the arguments for the change, takes a look at the official justification and actual reasons, and reveals some of the consequences of the name change in the past decade. The main contention of the paper is that the renaming of the Hungarian state that took place in 2011 lacked any overt and reasonable justification, and is best explained as an expression of anti-republican sentiment, which indicated, and partly paved the way for the transition into a kind of an authoritarian regime. Finally, the study raises a possible interpretation of the renaming of the Hungarian state in 2011, the point of which is that it adumbrated many later changes in public law and political systems.

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Tan, David. 2017. "Semiotics and the Spectacle of Transformation in Copyright Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (4): 593-623. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9508-y.

ABSTRACT: Copyright law is often premised on the identification of an author of a literary, dramatic, musical, or artistic work, and then giving this author exclusive rights for a limited period to control the commercial exploitation of his or her intellectual creation. However, the hegemonic modernist position of the romantic authorial text has been challenged by numerous scholars who have argued that the meaning of a text lies not in its origin but in its destination. Roland Barthes' work, controversial at the time of publication with its assault on modernity and the primacy of authorial control, has nonetheless laid the groundwork for an important body of scholarship on interpretive communities. Whether one adopts the position of neoconservative postmodernism or poststructural postmodernism, this article argues that a semiotic analysis of works of copyright as "signs'', "myths'' and "polysemous texts'' will nonetheless offer an important framework to understand the full reach of the transformative use doctrine in the United States today.

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Tans, Olaf. 2018. "Knowledge Construction in Legal Reasoning: A Three Stage Model of Law's Evolution in Practical Discourse." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 31 (1): 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9516-y.

ABSTRACT: Seeing that socio-legal theory has produced a number of compelling grand theories about law's development as a body of knowledge, this contribution analyzes legal evolution on the micro-level of decision-making in concrete cases. To that end, law finding is reconstructed as a three stage process of reason-based rule-construction. Legal evolution is argued to stem from the argumentative jumps that are made in this process in order to use what is initially drawn from the body of legal knowledge in new cases. These jumps are justified by additional reasoning that plays a crucial role in that it brings new information to the law finding process. It is explained how this new information gets incorporated in the body of knowledge as a result of discursive maneuvers of legal practitioners.

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Tao, Kimberly. 2017. "Discourse, Identity, and Social Change in the Marriage Equality Debates." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (1): 171-174. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9494-5.

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Tao, Kimberly Wei Yi. 2016. "Exploring the Sources of Authority Over the Word Meaning in Transgender Jurisprudence." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 29 (1): 29-44. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9433-x.

ABSTRACT: This paper looks at transgender identities and the law in the context of marriage in common law jurisdictions. It particularly focuses on the nature and sources of authority over word meaning as well as the role of language and definition in classifying transgender individuals into a legal category. When it comes to the legal question of who may marry whom, and what the terms "man" and "woman" actually refer to, there is no statutory definition of the terms "man", "woman", "male" and "female". This has put the onus on judges, especially those who needed to decide whether a transgender person can marry in his/her affirmed sex, to interpret these terms. Two lines of cases in transgender jurisprudence are examined so as to have a close study of how the courts construed these terms and classified transgender people into a category. The first concerns United Kingdom cases, namely Corbett v Corbett (1971), Bellinger v Bellinger (2003) and the Hong Kong case W v Registrar of Marriages (2010), (2011) & (2013). The second consists of Australian cases such as Secretary, Department of Social Security v State Rail Authority (1993) and Re Kevin (2002). This paper discusses these issues by analyzing and comparing different cases in transgender jurisprudence as well as examining how these issues play out in contemporary Hong Kong.

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Teraoka, Tomonori. 2017. "A Court as the Process of Signification: Legal Semiotics of the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (1): 115-127. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9484-7.

ABSTRACT: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons in 1996 was a landmark case because, for the first time in history, the legal aspect of nuclear weapons was addressed. The decision has evoked controversies regarding the Court's conclusion, the legal status of international humanitarian law in relation to nuclear weapons, and a newly introduced concept of state survival. While much legal scholarship discusses and criticizes the legal significance of the opinion, there has not been enough scholarship examining the Court's specific choice of words and concepts that sustain its wider ideological and political position in the opinion. The paper argues that the Court's vague and controversial logic is attributed to its confrontation with two international orders/codes: the legal order (or international law) and the political order (or state practice). The paper engages in legal semiotics as methodology to decode legal text and discover a deep structure that sustains networks of codes, according to which text is interpreted. Through the semiotic examination of three sets of key concepts (1) "permitted" and "prohibited," (2) "threat of use" and "possession of the weapon," and (3) "state survival," the paper shows the ICJ's confrontation with two orders/codes and eventual prioritization of the political order over the international legal order. The analysis of the opinion based on legal semiotics indicates an intimate and inseparable relationship between state practice and international law, which must be disentangled for the sake of the rule of law.

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Trzaskawka, Paula. 2020. "Selected Clauses of a Copyright Contract in Polish and English in Translation by Google Translate: A Tentative Assessment of Quality." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (3): 689-705. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09680-2.

ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to carry out a comparative analysis of clauses in Polish and English copyright agreements in respect of their translation by a computer assisted tool-Google Translate, and to assess the quality of such translation. The comparison of parallel texts as a research method has been applied. The research corpora include authentic Polish and English Copyright Agreements. The analysed clauses have been excerpted from the above mentioned Copyright Agreements. The author chose the most standard clauses as well as clauses typical for copyright contracts. As a result of the analysis, translations provided by Google Translate are better in terms of typical clauses but of worse quality in terms of specialised copyright clauses.

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Urquiza-Haas, Nayeli. 2017. "The Semiotic Fractures of Vulnerable Bodies: Resistance to the Gendering of Legal Subjects." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (4): 543-562. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9502-9.

ABSTRACT: While the turn to vulnerability in law responds to a recurrent critique by feminist scholars on the disembodiment of legal personhood, this article suggests that the mobilization of vulnerability in the criminal courts does not necessarily offer female drug mules a direct path to justice. Through an analysis of sentencing appeals of female drug mules in England and Wales, this article presents a feminist critique of the dispositif of the person and its relation to vulnerability. Discourses on drug mules' vulnerability mobilize the trope of the colonial victim in need of protection, which is often translated into legal mercy. But mercy is rather an expression of biopower which inscribes not only fragility onto the bodies of drug mules by figuring them as exemplar paradigms of colonial subjectivity, but also reinvigorates the dispositif of gender implicit in the legal person. In this set-up, it would appear as if law and politics totalize the registers of life, in this case the contours of vulnerable body. The article suggests we must revisit the image of the wounded body in order to carve out a space for resistance. Drawing on Elaine Scarry and Judith Butler, it suggests vulnerable bodies are marked by a semiotic openness, which renders them subject to appropriation but also able to signify the precarity produced by the law through their resistance to representation.

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van Engelenhoven, Gerlov. 2020. "From Indigenous Customary Law to Diasporic Cultural Heritage: Reappropriations of Adat Throughout the History of Moluccan Postcolonial Migration." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09781-y.

ABSTRACT: Adat is originally an Arabic term meaning "custom" or "habit", and was introduced by Islamic merchants in Maluku and throughout the Indonesian archipelago from the 1200s onward. The term was used as a way to refer to indigenous customs that could not be incorporated into Islamic law. Therefore, rather than referring to a particular system of customs or laws, adat denoted Islamic law's indeterminate opposite: i.e. the wide variety of indigenous practices which, other than this generalizing label of "custom", remained undefined. Throughout the chapter, I will trace the development of this term from its original usage to its current-day reinterpretation as a form of diasporic cultural heritage by the Moluccan postcolonial migrant community in the Netherlands. As will become clear, the contemporary Moluccan application can be understood as a strategic reappropriation of the term for the construction of their collective identity, which leaves intact the term's original capacity of having no fixed definition. By placing the Moluccan application of adat within the historical context of their separatist ideology vis-a-vis Indonesia, and their migration to the Netherlands in the early 1950s, I will argue that their reappropriation of adat as a deliberately indefinable form of Moluccan cultural heritage can be understood as a way for them to protect their collective identity as a separatist people from becoming a matter of wider contestation.

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van Roermund, Bert. 2014. "Following Legal Rules: Visibility and Feasibility." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 27 (3): 485-494. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-013-9355-4.

ABSTRACT: This paper reflects on the idea of 'visualization' of legal rules as part of an account of rule following in action. Presenting an alternative to Van Schooten's (Jurisprudence and communication. Deborah Charles, Liverpool, 2012) account of interpretation, I first distinguish between two modes of interpretation: rehearsing and discursive. I argue that the former is the more basic one, relating to our respecting sources, rather than noticing signs, in action. In other (Wittgensteinian) words, we have to understand how we take guidance from rules. This account can profit from an analysis of what 'seeing' amounts to. Taking my cue from Merleau-Ponty, I point to the intertwinement between agent and world in seeing, in rule-following, and eventually in legal rule-following. The proof of the pudding is an alternative account of the time-honoured paradigm of legal interpretation: Hart's 'no vehicles in the park'. I show how this example is predicated on detecting 'depthclues' in a rule, which allow an agent to correlate his vantage point to a vanishing point of a rule. The example illustrates a key-feature of rule following: reflexivity. I cannot follow a rule unless I project myself into its picture.

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Vazquez, Melisa Liana. 2020. "End of Secular City Limits? On Law's Religious Neutrality in the City." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09742-5.

ABSTRACT: What is the relationship between law and religion in the modern Western secular city? Has religion been effectively subdued by secularization, its effects limited by law? Is the law neutral in its regard and treatment of religion? Does law have any limits in this regard? How does it go about formulating the limits of the city itself, in this context? Though it would seem that historical projects of secularization intended to employ strategies to drive the religious into the private realm, separating it from responsibilities deemed to belong to secular state apparatuses, I argue that these projects were never able to reach an absolute point or state of finalization. A deeper investigation of this "incompleteness" can offer a kind of analytical key to understanding why it is that conflicts between the secular and the religious persist. There is another somehow parallel incompleteness to cities themselves if we approach them from a semiotic-spatial point of view that I think strongly informs these issues. Following modern philosophers, phenomenologists and geographers in their studies of space, I take the view that space is not an entity "out there," existing a priori, but rather a social, sensorial and ultimately semiotic construction. Like secularization itself, then, the secular city is not (and cannot be) a "completed" entity but is rather a never-ceasing series of creations, disruptions and destructions. Understanding the religious in the secular city requires unbundling or unmasking its apparent material evidence to see how it is lived, and how it too creates, disrupts, destructs and resurges, eventually. The law of the secular city must engage the secular and the religious even as they fail to keep still. It may, however, have a strategic advantage in its own mutability, in the power of its semantic flexibility. The essay will attempt to show how the very mobility and changeability of law and its objects, once acknowledged, or brought to light, can empower processes of discomposition that trigger categorical shifts resulting in new outcomes to conflicts. In this way, the spatial limits of law could perhaps transform into unlimited possibilities for the agency of "secular" citizens.

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Verenich, Vadim. 2012. "Charles Sanders Peirce, A Mastermind of (Legal) Arguments." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 25 (1): 31-55. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-011-9216-y.

ABSTRACT: In this article, we try to trace the relationship between semiotics and theory of legal reasoning using Peirce's idea that all reasoning must be necessarily in signs: every act of reasoning/argumentation is a sign process, leading to "the growth of knowledge. The broad scope and universal character of Peirce's sign theory of reasoning allows us to look for new conciliatory paradigms, which must be presented in terms of possible synthesis between the traditional approaches to argumentation. These traditional approaches are strongly affected by either the dialectical (logical) perspective or the rhetorical perspective on argumentation, while Peirce's approach tends to reconcile the rhetorical and methodological aspects of reasoning. This reconcilation is best illustrated by Peircean analysis of argument's logical and rhetorical structure; while the diagrammatic (iconic) analysis of arguments is performed in the system of Existential Graphs (which is Peirce's major methodological system, designed for the expressions of propositions in point of their relational structure). Obviously, Peirce's original division of argument parts offered only the characterisation of the sign activity (involved in the process of reasoning), and thus left much to be desired in terms of practical explication.

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Villars, Rina. 2017. "Same-Sex Marriage and the Spanish Constitution: The Linguistic-Legal Meaning Interface." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (2): 273-300. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9491-8.

ABSTRACT: This paper analyzes the implications that the linguistic formulation of the marriage provision of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 had for securing the passage in 2005 of Law 13/2005, which legalized same-sex marriage (SSM). By claiming that a semantic (contextually recovered) omission in the original legal text was a marker of distributiveness (i.e., inclusiveness of SSM), SSM supporters aimed to avoid a constitutional amendment, and succeeded in doing so. This linguistic argument, based on implicitness, was instrumental as a subsidiary argument of political moral argumentation. Linguistic meaning therefore contributed decisively to both the legal meaning of the marriage provision and the content of the law (the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples via the Civil Code). I argue, against some assumptions in the literature stating otherwise, that linguistic meaning should not be dismissed in constitutional interpretation and adjudication.

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Vlachopoulos, Stefanos. 2007. "Legal Meanings Across Linguistic Barriers: The Intralingual and Interlingual Translation of Laws in Greece and Cyprus." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 20 (4): 305-325. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-007-9053-1.

internal-pdf://4146382307/Vlachopoulos-2007-Legal Meanings Across Lingui.pdf.

Volli, Ugo. 2013. "Who is the Author of Halakhah?" International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 26 (1): 191-210. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9268-7.

ABSTRACT: The Jewish Law (Halakahh) is probably the older legal system working in our time. It is established on a hierarchy of different texts. The oldest and more authoritative is the Torah (the five books of Moshe), then come the Mishnah, the Talmud, the compilation as Maimonide's Mishne Torah and Caro's Shulchan Arukh, then the responsa of the rabbis. While the authorship of the later texts is more or less clear, the one of the Torah is highly problematic, also in the self-understanding of Jewish hermeneutics. This question is discussed in the present paper not from a philological-historical point of view, but from a semiotic one, trying to understand what devices and regimes of enunciation are enacted by the text in order to establish its semiotic-juridical effects. A special double enunciation frame is proposed as the mark of the legislative power in the text, in correlation with another textual device, a sort of divine "signature". The further evolution of the authorship of the Jewish Law is discussed in its relation with the question of the autonomy in the interpretation of the sacred text.

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Volli, Ugo. 2020. "Reasonable, Ruled, Responsible Interpretation Theory and Practice in the Talmud." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (4): 951-968. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09737-2.

ABSTRACT: The paper begins by posing the theoretical problem of the foundation of reasonable interpretation and arguing that it cannot be realized by calculable rules or pure common sense or a hermeneutic "art". There must be rules that make the interpretation strategy explicit. This thesis is studied with the example of the Talmud, who theorises different levels of interpretation and above all builds lists of rules of the correct argument. It is shown how these rules have a rhetoric character and are governed by some meta-principles, such as the total significance of the sacred text, the hierarchy of sources, the principle of majority of the competent ones, to show at the end that in this tradition reasonableness is evaluated in terms of responsibility for interpretation.

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Wagner, Anne. 2003. "Translation of the Language of the Common Law into Legal French: Myth or reality." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 16: 177-193.

internal-pdf://1376709969/Wagner-2003-Translation of the Language of the.pdf.

Wagner, Anne. 2006. "The Rules of the Road, a Universal Visual Semiotics." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 19 (3): 311-324. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-006-9025-x.

ABSTRACT: The rules of the road form part an international willingness to simplify the understanding of road regulations worldwide. There is still an attempt to harmonise all regulations, but some countries are reluctant to do so as they fear a loss of their domestic sovereignty. Indeed, with the increase in car use for private or professional reasons, accidents have become one the central issue in international politics; and one way to curb accidents is said to have a universal visual road semiotics. However as this cultural discernment of road signs in civil society (i.e. visual encoding) has become popular, many other forms of use have derived from it for other purposes than road regulations.

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Wagner, Anne. 2010. "Mapping Legal Semiotics." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 23 (1): 77-82. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-009-9132-6.

ABSTRACT: The essay seeks to harness the diverse and innovative work to date of legal semiotics. It seeks to bring together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a preclusion to identifying fertile avenues for research.

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Wagner, Anne, and Jean-Claude Gémar. 2013. "Materializing Notions, Concepts and Language into Another Linguistic Framework." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 26 (4): 731-745. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-013-9339-4.

ABSTRACT: Conceptualizing two distinctive cultural elements has become a significant framework in legal discourse analysis and legal translation. It strives for rational clarity, objective justification and textual precision. Indeed, materialization is an act of cross-cultural communication, which implies matching cultural elements of two different languages rather than only considering the linguistic elements.

internal-pdf://0945117137/Wagner-2013-Materializing Notions, Concepts an.pdf.

Wagner, Anne, and Jean-Claude Gémar. 2015. “Legal Translation and Jurilinguistics: Globalizing Disciplines. Retrospects and Prospects.” Special issue of The International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 28.

File Attachments

Wagner, Anne, and Jean-Claude Gemar. 2015. "Special Issue: Legal Translation and Jurilinguistics: Globalizing Disciplines. Retrospects and Prospects." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 28 (1): 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9405-1.

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Wagner, Anne, and Jean Claude Gémar. 2013. “The Process of Translabiliting: Translating and Transferring Law, its Concepts, Notions and Language.” Special issue of The International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 26 (4).

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Wai-Yee, Emily Poon. 2005. "The Cultural Transfer In Legal Translation." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 18: 307-323.

internal-pdf://2639188878/Wai-Yee-2005-The Cultural Transfer In Legal Tr.pdf.

Wang, Ling, and King Kui Sin. 2012. "Legal Translation and Cultural Transfer: A Framework for Translating the Common Law into Chinese in Hong Kong." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 26 (4): 883-896. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9286-5.

ABSTRACT: It is widely held in translation studies that translation proper is not merely a process of linguistic transfer but also of cultural transfer. But how cultural transfer is effected or whether it can be effected is not at all clear. The study begins with a critical analysis of the problems relating to law translation in general and translating the common law into Chinese in particular. It then examines the nature of cultural transfer in law translation with special reference to the translation of common law terminology. The study purports to set out the framework for legal translation as cultural transfer, in particular, for translating the common law into Chinese in Hong Kong. It argues that successful transfer of the legal culture of foreign laws always requires the adjustment of translating language and the employment of metalanguage.

internal-pdf://1869470014/Wang-2012-Legal Translation and Cultural Trans.pdf.

Wieclawska, Edyta. 2020. "Contextualising the Notion of Context in Jurilinguistic Studies." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (3): 637-656. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09701-0.

ABSTRACT: Context is a notion that is commonly invoked in many linguistic studies, either with very general reference or, more specifically, in the light of one of a number of research approaches which assign distinct definitions to context, ranging from factors that can be recovered from a text, through social parameters serving as an index for the appropriation of discursive performance, to factors that bring texts into being and give them meaning. This exploratory and descriptive research problematises the notion of context specifically on the grounds of English/Polish translation of corporate documentation processed in company registration proceedings, touching upon factors that are presumed to be discursively relevant in this communicative situation. The study is conducted from the perspective of the sociocultural approach and it adopts the parallel corpus methodology. The author discusses the concept of context on the ground of legal communication and secondarily presents a corpus-based description of the context categories that are idiosyncratic and potentially discursively relevant for the said communicative situation in the cross-linguistic perspective. The contextual variation is tested for its capacity to affect translation performance. The results reveal specific tendencies as regards the distribution patterns in the values corresponding to the investigated context categories. They point to some divergencies in translation output caused by the source text variantivity and they pave the way and directions for further research. Already at this stage the findings may have significant pedagogical value and they constitute a solid starting point for sociolinguistic research on discourse variantivity.

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Willems, Vera. 2017. "International Courts and Tribunals and Their Linguistic Practices: A Communities of Practice Approach." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 30 (2): 181-199. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9486-5.

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that the framework of Community of Practice is beneficial for an understanding of the linguistic practices that international courts and tribunals employ in their interpretative approaches. Other than the frameworks of the social network, the speech community, and the epistemic community, the framework of Community of Practice can be said to allow for a more critical assessment of the social context in which international courts and tribunals function. Such an assessment is crucial in that it is in that social context that interpretative approaches can be said to take form and in return shape the social institutions that international courts and tribunals comprise. That is, the framework of Community of Practice entails the notion that any form of meaning and its subsequent reifications, including, actual language use, are continually negotiated communally as a result of social interaction and, hence, shape the social constellations in which such interaction takes place accordingly.

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Wirth, Michelle Louise. 2009. "Who's Your Daddy? Or: Using Semiotic Tools to Deconstruct Legal Determinations of Who Holds Parenthood Obligations and Privileges." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 22 (1): 83-104. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-008-9097-x.

ABSTRACT: This paper provides a brief explanation and illustration of the phenomenon of semiotics. It then describes the conceptual tools of semiotics and how lawyers can use semiotics in law to create compelling arguments. Last, the paper applies the tools of semiotics to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court case Ferguson v. McKiernan, 940 A. 2d 1236 (Pa. 2008), to reveal the shift in social context that made the lines of legal reasoning behind the outcome appear "self-evident.''

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Witteveen, Willem. 2014. "How Do Fictions Construe Our Laws for Us?" International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 27 (3): 495-504. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-014-9365-x.

ABSTRACT: This paper on van Schooten's book starts from the observation that citizens untrained in the law are yet able to live by the law, while not being part of the established interpretive community. They manage to live with fictions. Neither the discredited flow model of legal communication rejected by Van Schooten nor her own semiotic and institutional alternative theory manages to deal with this phenomenon in an adequate way. We can learn from Plato's discussion with Crito in which the laws were imagined as speaking beings that there is a long philosophical tradition according to which laws are imagined to speak to us (while everybody knows otherwise). Working with this legal fiction in our own democratic societies requires an analysis of the way fictions construe our laws for us. Five of these fictions are then briefly mentioned: perfect or at least adequate legal knowledge; legislative intention; instrumental reason; the General Interest; and the rule of measures, not of men.

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Witteveen, W. J. 1990. "The Rhetorical Labors of Hercules." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 3 (9): 227-254. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01130328.

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Wojtasik-Dziekan, Emilia. 2020. "Analysis of the Semantic Scope of Two Korean Terms Equivalent to EnglishCourt." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 33 (3): 657-671. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09693-x.

ABSTRACT: The article aims to analyze the semantic fields of two Korean terms in the field of a specialized judicial terminology, i.e.courtandtribunal, which are usually reflected in English by one hypernym termcourt. This analysis, although carried out on limited Korean data, is intended to indicate the differences between the use of these two different Korean terms and to indicate the reasons whycourtis currently the most common English equivalent. At the same time, the author, by pointing to the historical and cultural background, explains the reasons why the termcourtis not always correct. The methods used in compiling the data are to highlight differences in the semantics of Korean terms covered by an English hypernymcourt.

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Wu, Jingjing. 2020. "A Perspective of Objectivity in International Human Rights Treaties." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09695-9.

ABSTRACT: In this paper I argue that there is objectivity in international human rights law, against which the justifiability of arguments can be determined, and which could advance the universality versus relativity of human rights debate. Revisiting the three schools of treaty interpretation (i.e. textual, intentional, and teleological) and applying the three elements of Radbruch's rule of law, I discuss how the interpreter's job of balancing those schools has limited room for manoeuvre. I further propose an approach to help jurists detect unjustifiable arguments in treaty interpretation, often in the disguise of relativism. That approach consists of: (a) a non-justifiable argument contradicts all three schools of treaty interpretation; or ignores all three; (b) a justifiable argument is supported by at least one of these schools; (c) a better argument is a more balanced argument, i.e. supported by more elements of interpretation. Finally, I argue that there is a degree of objectivity in each school of treaty interpretation, which is supported by shared intention and speech act theory, and can therefore be held to apply to the whole process of treaty interpretation. I illustrate above arguments with a case (Golder vs. the United Kingdom), a doctrine (international human rights legal regimes' interpretation of the exhaustion of domestic remedies rule), and a country (China's relativistic arguments on Article 1 of the Convention against Torture).

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Yu, Wei. 2021. "Reporting Verbs in Court Judgments of theCommon LawSystem: A Corpus-Based Study." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 34 (2): 525-560. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09740-7.

ABSTRACT: Professionals in various disciplines adopt significantly different lexicons to report their discoveries and arguments. Scientists discover, philosophers argue, whereas legal practitioners apply and consider. Reporting, as a ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon, has its disciplinary characteristics. In court judgments, it reflects the way judges identify the evidence of different documents or other courts. In the self-built court judgment corpus, the paper focuses on the way that judicial arguments are constructed through reporting verbs. On the basis of the analysis of the representation and distribution of reporting verbs in court judgments, the study identifies the reporting verbs with high frequencies in court judgments and compares these reporting verbs with those in the comparable reference corpus, written sampler of British National Corpus, which works as a reference corpus. It is found that (1) the tokens of reporting verbs in court judgments are slightly less than those in general texts; (2) the distribution pattern of the speech act verbs and mental verbs in the self-built court judgment corpus is similar to the pattern of two kinds of reporting verbs in the reference corpus; (3) judicial speech act verbs are employed to express the authority of the statements, whereas the judicial mental verbs illustrate the legal reasoning process with individual agents; and (4) there is a significant difference in terms of the reporting verbs' frequencies within the court judgments and general texts. The results show that the reporting verbs in court judgments have their uniqueness, which may cast light on both judicial and pedagogical practices.

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Zirk-Sadowski, Marek. 2012. "Interpretation of Law and Judges Communities." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue Internationale De Semiotique Juridique 25 (4): 473-487. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-011-9239-4.

ABSTRACT: The principle of omnia sunt interpretanda refers to the derivational conception and derivational theory of interpretation. The principle appears in disputes concerning the role of a judge in the process of interpretation, and this has produced an effect that Polish theory of law is currently getting closer to the conceptions presented in the American debate on activism and textualism. In the practice of jurisdiction, the principle of omnia sunt interpretanda is mostly invoked outside theoretical context. It becomes a manifestation of a new dimension of judicial independence, namely an independent authority over the meaning of legal text. In the following paper the legal cultures and legal theories involved in the dispute are being disclosed in order to put in question the possibility of achieving a clear result of interpretation against a background of a crisis of the relations between law and law-making state, which manifests itself in the peculiar process of legal institutions becoming autonomous in relation to state institutions. In this context, the aforementioned principle constitutes the manifestation of the way in which courts come up with a new definition of the role of the third (sui generic) power. The certain organizational requirements placed upon the courts (especially the SAC and provincial administrative courts) are being scrutinized in order to find out in which mode it is possible to at least reduce the degree of inconsistency of the results of interpretation. Here, the attempt to organize a community of judges for the activities of legal interpretation undertaken by them plays a crucial role.

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