Signs In Law - A Source Book

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

   PDF

2. Introduction: Reading Semiotics

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

      PDF

   2. Reading Semiotics

      • Jan M. Broekman, Larry Catá Backer

      Pages 3-20

   3. Eco and the Text of the Communist Manifesto

      • Jan M. Broekman, Larry Catá Backer

      Pages 21-24

3. From Legal Significs to Legal Semiotics

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 25-25

      PDF

   2. Origins and Effects of Legal Significs

      • Jan M. Broekman, Larry Catá Backer

      Pages 27-30

   3. “Word-Value” and “The ‘I’”

      • Frederik van Eeden

      Pages 31-39

   4. Significs (1953); Significs and Philosophy (1922)

      • Gerrit Mannoury

      Pages 41-42

   5. Significs [Encyclopedia Britannica] (1911)

      • Lady Victoria Welby

      Pages 43-49

   6. Editorial 1: Jacob Israel De Haan, the First Legal Semiotician

      • Jan M. Broekman, Larry Catá Backer

      Pages 51-53

   7. Essence and Task of Legal Significs

      • Jacob Israël De Haan

      Pages 55-71

   8. Legal Significs and Its Application in the Concepts ‘Liable’, ‘Responsible’ and ‘Accountable’

      • Jacob Israël De Haan

      Pages 73-86

4. Godfathers of Semiotics—Welby, Peirce, Greimas, Lacan

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 87-87

      PDF

   2. Editorial 2: “Meaning” and the Welby—Peirce Correspondence

      • Jan M. Broekman, Larry Catá Backer

      Pages 89-90

   3. Meaning

      • Lady Victoria Welby

      Pages 91-94

   4. Two Letters to Lady Welby

      • Charles Sanders Peirce

      Pages 95-111

   5. Editorial 3: Firstness, Shock, and Signs (Peirce)

      • Jan M. Broekman, Larry Catá Backer

      Pages 113-116

   6. Firstness, Shock, Law, and the Hand of the Sheriff

      • Charles Sanders Peirce

      Pages 117-123

   7. Editorial 4: Layered Discourses, Dynamic Semiotics

      • Jan M. Broekman, Larry Catá Backer

      Pages 125-127

   8. A View on A. J. Greimas’s Essay “The Semiotic Analysis of a Legal Discourse: Commercial Laws That Govern Companies and Groups of Companies”

      • Larry Catá Backer

      Pages 129-140

This volume provides a critical roadmap through the major historical sources of legal semiotics as we know them today. The history of legal semiotics, now at least a century old, has never been written (a non-event itself pregnant with semiotic possibility).  As a consequence, its sources are seldom clearly exposed and, as word, object and meaning change, are sometimes lost. They reach from an English translation of the 1916 inaugural lecture of the first Chair in Legal Significs at the Amsterdam University, via mid 20th century studies on “property” or “contract,” to equally fascinating essays on contemporary semiotic problems produced by former students of the Roberta Kevelson Semiotics Roundtable Seminar at Penn State University 2012 and 2013. Together, the materials in this book weave the fabric of semiotics and significs, two names for the unfolding of semiotics in law and legal discourse at least until the second half of the 20th century, and both of which covered a lawyer’s focus on sign and meaning in law.  The latter is embedded within the cultural imperatives of the civilization that gave these terms meaning and made them an effective tool for the dissection of law, its reconstitution as an instrument to be used by the lawyer to advance the interests of her clients, and for judges as a means to restructure language as a narrative of law whose power could bend behavior to its strictures. Legal semiotics has become an indispensible part of the elite lawyer’s toolkit and a fundamental approach to analysis of legal texts. Two previous volumes published in 2011 and 2012 explored the conceptual, methodological and epistemological progress in the field of legal semiotics, the modern forms of semiotics study, and the mechanics of meaning making processes by lawyers. Yet the great lessons of semiotics requires a focus on the origins of the concepts and frameworks that would become contemporary legal semiotics, its origins as an object of the consciousness of meaning making—one whose roots, as lessons for the oracular conversations of law, are expanded in this volume.

• Interpretation of Signs
• Jacob Israel de Haan
• Legal Semiotics
• Legal Significs
• Legal Significs and its Application
• Meaning of Signs in Law
• Origins and Effects of Legal Significs
• Reading Semiotics
• Rhetorical Analysis of Peirce’s Semiotics
• Semiotic Analysis of a Legal Discourse
• Semiotic Constraints
• Semiotic Model of Law
• Semiotics and Legal Theory
• Semiotics and Legal Theory
• Semiotics in Law
• Semiotics of Law in Legal Education
• Semiotics, and Psychoanalysis
• Significs and Significs and Philosophy
• Signs and Legal Discourse
• Signs in Law
• Studies in the Development of Significance
• Task of Legal Significs
• The Law as a System of Signs
• The Signific Movement
• What is Significs?

• Dickinson School of Law, Penn State University, Carlisle, USA

  Jan M. Broekman

• Departments of Law and International Affairs, Penn State University, Carlisle, USA

  Larry Catá Backer

Policies and ethics