Jurisprudence: A Transfer Science

This article juxtaposes dogmatics and deconstruction to argue that the latter is no more than an inverted or decomposed species of the former. Taking the contemporary attraction of law to other disciplines as her starting point, Vismann traces the history of linguist interest in law. Focussing on Derrida’s exemplary and essentially glossatorial analyses of legal textuality, and of the paradoxes and aporias of legal language, she argues that deconstruction offers few surprises to lawyers long trained in the philological ironies of power. A more constructive understanding of the conjunction of dogmatics and deconstruction would thus look to the role of law as a science of transfer from the real to the symbolic and would in this vein focus on the hardware of legal acts of transfer, such as filing systems and thus propose a prehistory of cyber legality. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.