Beyond Peirce: The New Science of Semiotics and the Semiotics of Law

This paper shows how Peirce's semeiotic could be turned into a powerful science. The New Science of Semiotics provides not only a new paradigm and an empirical justification for all these applications, but also a rational and systematic procedure for carrying them out as well. Thus the New Science of Semiotics transforms the philosophy of law into the science of legal scholarship, the discipline that I call jurisology.

The Semiotics of Memes in the Law: Jack Balkin’s Promise of Legal Semiotics

The jurisprudent Jack M. Balkin introduced the analogy of memes as a semiotic device for understanding the law. His notion of cultural software into which this device was inserted is developed first, followed by a development of memetic analysis and its several semiotic dimensions. After a brief treatment of the position of ideology in view of memetic analysis, and the corresponding notion of transcendence, Balkin’s explicitly semiotic setting for this doctrine is displayed. This method is then briefly applied to the civilian doctrine of patrimony, to supplement Balkin’s application of it to common law institutions.     

The Semiotics of Fundamentalist Authoriality

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.     

EU Law and Semiotics

The European Union is one of the ‘big ideas’ of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and has been built on the idea of the European Community, which it supersedes. Seen in this light the emergent law of the European Union is becoming omnipresent in so many ways and yet it does not appear to have been the subject of as much semiotic study as it deserves. This paper takes a multilingual stance and explores emerging EC and EU law from a perspective of a lawyer-linguist practitioner in the field. The purpose is to describe a range of practitioner ‘realities’ and to explore how semiotics provides a tool for analysis and insights for a better understanding and awareness of EU law, with particular emphasis on the legislative, or law-making aspects.     

The Promise of Legal Semiotics

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.     

Derrida,Semiotics and Justice

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.     

电视真人秀节目的符号学应用

电视真人秀节目要获得成功可以运用符号学的一些原理进行节目创作:在节目定位上注重标出性,加大提喻修辞方法的运用,善于使用符号表意进行受众引导,大量运用像似符号、指示符号和规约性符号,并采用伴随文本相配合的方式吸引眼球。电视媒体可以从符号学角度进一步挖掘电视节目制作手法,以实现节目创新。     

Semiotics and the Spectacle of Transformation in Copyright Law

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.     

Semiotics,Civic Education And The Internet

This essay examines civic education and the representational capacity of the Internet. Of concern is encouraging citizens to think about law and politics as something more than just a zero-sum process and the Internet as a public forum. These observations take a semiotic approach to the representational character of the Internet. I recommend alertness and responsiveness to the complexity of public affairs and skepticism about anything else other than provisional and hypothetical social analysis.     

Semiotics for Citizens in Government Web Sites

High alert exists when the semiotic components of electronic communication are challenged to induce responsive citizenship. Evaluations of the uses of existing government websites are particularly important in that regard. They form a high tech network of data and communication efforts but do not contribute to the education of citizens. Do we dislike education when carried out by government? Governments seldom focus education as a force to change attitude and mentality of the citizenry. To educate means to create a difference through an educated appreciation of others – a necessary condition for life in institutions, supported by citizens who themselves grew up in the Western hemisphere with its overemphasis on ego-directed national goals, values and interests. One observes how materials for an electronically enhanced education program, made available in government web sites, remain out of use. An education deficit must be mentioned, which in its turn underestimates the contribution to semiotics in law and politics, in particular where theoretical foundations of the virtual are at stake.     

A Legal Semiotics Framework for Exploring the Origins of Hermagorean Stasis

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 Miklós K?ncz?l 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.     

商标五分法的法学与符号学分析

所谓商标五分,是指按照是否具备显著性以及显著性强弱将各种标志划分为臆造商标、随意商标、暗示商标、描述性词汇和通用名称五种类型.     

反不正当竞争法律制度的完善

作为我国反不正当竞争法律制度开始建立标志的《反不正当竞争法》 ,已经出台 6年多了。行政执法的实践表明 ,《反不正当竞争法》对于鼓励公平竞争 ,反对不正当竞争 ,保护经营者和消费者的合法权益 ,发挥了重要作用 ,但是其中暴露出一些问题 ,应亟待进一步完善。