Vico and Imagination: An Ingenious Approach to Educating Lawyers with Semiotic Sensibility

Law is a specialized semiotic realm, but lawyers generally are ignorant of this fact. Lawyers may manage meaning, but they also are managed by meaning. Seemingly trapped by the weight of pre-existing signs, their attempts to manage these meanings generally are limited to technical interventions and instrumentalist strategies. Signs have power over lawyers because they are embedded in narratives, a semiotic economy that confronts the lawyer as “given” even though it is dynamic and constantly under construction. Most lawyers do not make meaning through legal narratives; rather, they parrot bits of the controlling narratives in response to certain problems. Because clients often can achieve their objectives when their lawyers crudely manipulate the symbols of law, these endeavors pay very well. Well-paid lawyers tend not to ask too many questions. Consequently, semiotics is, at best, misunderstood by lawyers; more likely it is wholly unknown. A lawyer’s avowed instrumentalism is the very problem to be addressed in this regard. For the scope of discussion, I refer to Vico’s famous On the Study Methods of Our Time and draw my conclusion for the lawyer of our time.     

Five Years Later: Reconsidering the Original ABA Report on MDP

Reconsidering the original report issued in 1999 by the ABA Commission on Multidisciplinary Practice, this essay suggests that that report properly attempted to deal with questions of legal ethics that might arise if the practice of law by lawyers were integrated into an enterprise in which nonlawyers had a significant degree of ultimate control, but that the commission, perhaps because of undue time pressure, neglected to pursue these questions deeply enough. This essay suggests that more was needed than a proposed mechanism for self-certification of compliance with rules of legal ethics, coupled with possible review of compliance. The "more" that was needed, this essay further suggests, was a proposal for the licensing of an enterprise in which lawyers do not have exclusive ultimate control, as a precondition to permitting lawyers in the enterprise to offer legal services to the general public. Thus, before it could offer legal services to the general public, such an enterprise would need to comply with requirements for obtaining a license, and noncompliance with rules of legal ethics could bring into play traditional disciplinary measures including, where appropriate, suspension or revocation of the license.     

Constancy and change in the U.S. age distribution of crime: A test of the “invariance hypothesis”

The recent controversy over the age relationship with criminal behavior can be traced to Hirschi and Gottfredson's (Am. J. Sociol. 89, 552–584, 1983) failure to define invariance. In this paper, I distinguish two types of invariance—parametric andmathematical form— that explains both the pattern of stability claimed by Hirschi and Gottfredson and the pattern of variability observed in more recent research. I then directly test for each type of invariance using age-specific arrest data for index offenses in the United States from 1952 to 1987. The results are largely consistent with recent research showing variability in the characteristics (i.e., parameters) of the age distribution of crime, but at the same time, the results provide evidence for a persistent, underlying mathematical form to the age distribution of crime, regardless of year or offense type.     

Russia: From Energy Villain to Environmental Hero?

Global development of unconventional natural gas sources using hydraulic fracturing techniques has intensified energy security issues and environmental concerns, including freshwater contamination and climate change. Russian energy policy and its natural gas monopoly, Gazprom, have shaped European energy concerns. The discussion presents the goals of the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) as a response. It describes Russia's controversial involvement in the ECT process and examines the United States’ role as a worldwide model for shale development. This article finds that Russia's ratification of the ECT presents a good solution for environmental and trade relations problems that Russia and European countries face today.