Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Signs In Law - A Source Book

The Semiotics of Law in Legal Education III

  • Textbook
  • © 2015
Download book PDF
Download book EPUB

Overview

Editors:
  1. Jan M. Broekman

    1. Dickinson School of Law, Penn State University, Carlisle, USA

    View editor publications

    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

  2. Larry Catá Backer

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

    View editor publications

    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

  • The first volume to offer texts and commentary on the meaning of signs in law
  • Provides a structure for understanding the significance of signs in law and social sciences
  • Provides insights as to why reading is a phenomenon filled with signs, a resource of signification ready to be articulated?
  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Buy print copy

Softcover Book USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Table of contents (35 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xviii
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction: Reading Semiotics

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1
      Download chapter PDF

    2. Reading Semiotics

      • Jan M. Broekman, Larry Catá Backer
      Pages 3-20
      Download chapter PDF

    3. Eco and the Text of the Communist Manifesto

      • Jan M. Broekman, Larry Catá Backer
      Pages 21-24
      Download chapter PDF

  3. From Legal Significs to Legal Semiotics

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 25-25
      Download chapter PDF

    2. Origins and Effects of Legal Significs

      • Jan M. Broekman, Larry Catá Backer
      Pages 27-30
      Download chapter PDF

    3. “Word-Value” and “The ‘I’”

      • Frederik van Eeden
      Pages 31-39
      Download chapter PDF

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

      • Gerrit Mannoury
      Pages 41-42
      Download chapter PDF

    5. Significs [Encyclopedia Britannica] (1911)

      • Lady Victoria Welby
      Pages 43-49
      Download chapter PDF

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

      • Jan M. Broekman, Larry Catá Backer
      Pages 51-53
      Download chapter PDF

    7. Essence and Task of Legal Significs

      • Jacob Israël De Haan
      Pages 55-71
      Download chapter PDF

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

      • Jacob Israël De Haan
      Pages 73-86
      Download chapter PDF

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

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 87-87
      Download chapter PDF

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

      • Jan M. Broekman, Larry Catá Backer
      Pages 89-90
      Download chapter PDF

    3. Meaning

      • Lady Victoria Welby
      Pages 91-94
      Download chapter PDF

    4. Two Letters to Lady Welby

      • Charles Sanders Peirce
      Pages 95-111
      Download chapter PDF

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

      • Jan M. Broekman, Larry Catá Backer
      Pages 113-116
      Download chapter PDF

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

      • Charles Sanders Peirce
      Pages 117-123
      Download chapter PDF

    7. Editorial 4: Layered Discourses, Dynamic Semiotics

      • Jan M. Broekman, Larry Catá Backer
      Pages 125-127
      Download chapter PDF

    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
      Download chapter PDF
Back to top

Keywords

About this book

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.

Editors and Affiliations

  • 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

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Back to top

Search

Navigation