Contemporary Issues of the Semiotics of Law: Cultural and Symbolic Analyses of Law in a Global Context (O~nati International Series in Law and Society)

287 Pages·2005·1.4 MB·English

by  Farid Samir Benavides Vanegas

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES OF THE SEMIOTICS
OF LAW
Oñati International Series in Law and Society
A SERIES PUBLISHED FOR THE OÑATI INSTITUTE
FOR THE SOCIOLOGY OF LAW
General Editors
William L F Felstiner Johannes Feest
Board of General Editors
Rosemary Hunter, Griffiths University, Australia
Carlos Lugo, Hostos Law School, Puerto Rico
David Nelken, Macerata University, Italy
Jacek Kurczewski, Warsaw University, Poland
Marie Claire Foblets, Leuven University, Belgium
Roderick Macdonald, McGill University, Canada
Titles in this Series
Social Dynamics of Crime and Control: New Theories for a World in
Transition edited by Susannah Karstedt and Kai Bussmann
Criminal Policy in Transition edited by Andrew Rutherford and Penny
Green
Making Law for Families edited by Mavis Maclean
Poverty and the Law edited by Peter Robson and Asbjørn Kjønstad
Adapting Legal Cultures edited by Johannes Feest and David Nelken
Rethinking Law Society and Governance: Foucault’s Bequest edited by
Gary Wickham and George Pavlich
Rules and Networks edited by Richard Appelbaum, Bill Felstiner and
Volkmar Gessner
Women in the World’s Legal Professions edited by Ulrike Schultz and
Gisela Shaw
Healing the Wounds edited by Marie-Claire Foblets and Trutz von Trotha
Imaginary Boundaries of Justice edited by Ronnie Lippens
Family Law and Family Values edited by Mavis Maclean
Contemporary Issues of the Semiotics of Law edited by Anne Wagner,
Tracey Summerfield and Farid Samir Benavides Vanegas
The Geography of Law: Landscapes, Identity and Regulationedited by Bill
Taylor
Contemporary Issues of the
Semiotics of Law
Cultural and Symbolic Analyses of Law
in a Global Context
Edited by
Anne Wagner, Tracey Summerfield and
Farid Samir Benavides Vanegas
Oñati International Series in Law and Society
A SERIES PUBLISHED FOR THE OÑATI INSTITUTE
FOR THE SOCIOLOGY OF LAW
OXFORD AND PORTLAND OREGON
2005
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ISBN 1-84113-545-3 (cloth)
ISBN 1-84113-546-1 (paper)
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Contents
Biographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Introduction Law's Garden of Forking Paths by Anne Wagner,
Tracey Summerfield and Farid Samir Benavides
Vanegas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Part I: The Interpretation and Pertinence of Law in the
Global Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1 Refugee Meanings by Ian Duncanson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2 Citizens, Immigrants, Anarchists and Other Animals
by Annabelle Mooney . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3 The Dialogistic Nature of Brazil’s Arbitration Law
9.307/96 by Celina Frade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
4 Constitutional ‘Communarchy’: A Constitution with Chinese
Characteristics by Deborah Cao . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71
5 The Quest for Certainty in Recent US Constitutional
Scholarship: Original Intent and the Practice of Constitutional
‘Creativity’ by Frederick P Lewis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
6 Celebrity as Authority in Law by John Brigham and
Jill Meyers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
7 Writing Around the Censor: Gypsies, Thieves, and Rebels
in Early Modern Spain by William Pencak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Part II: Cultural and Symbolic Analyses of the Law in
Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
8 Subversion in the World of Order: Legal Deconstruction as a
Rhetorical Practice by Joanna Jemielniak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
9 The Substantive Issue and the Rhetoric of the Abortion
Debate in Ireland by Sophie Cacciaguidi-Fahy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
10 Wealth of Terms—Scarcity of Justice? Term Formation in
Statutory Definitions by Richard Foley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
11 Enduring Signs and Obscure Meanings: Contested Coats of
Arms in Australian Jurisdictions by Richard Mohr . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
12 Critical Race Reggae: The Sound of a Narrative
by Aaron RS Lorenz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
13 Cromer's Olde England and the Dome's New Britain:
Two Same/Different Imageries of the Law of Britain's
Empire by Ronnie Lippens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
vi Contents
14 Law in the Age of Images: The Challenge of Visual Literacy
by Christina O Spiesel, Richard K Sherwin, Neal Feigenson . . . . . 231
Selected Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .267
Biographical Notes
Farid Benavides studied Law and Philosophy in Colombia. Then he did a
Masters in Penal Systems and Social Problems in Barcelona. He is current-
ly studying a PhD in Political Science at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst. He recently published a book on the constitution of the concept
of nation in Victorian London and has written on questions related to
human rights, postcolonial theory, and development.
John Brigham is a professor in the Political Science Department of the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Constitutional
Language (1978), The Cult of the Court (1987) and The Constitution of
Interests (1996).
Sophie Cacciaguidi-Fahy is a Lecturer in Law (Legal French) at the
National University of Ireland, Galway. Her research interests include Law
and Language, Legal Semiotics and Intercultural Legal and Business
Communication.
Deborah Cao is a senior lecturer affiliated with the School of Languages
and Linguistics and the Socio-Legal Research Centre, Griffith University,
Brisbane, Australia. She was educated in China and Australia in interpret-
ing and translation, linguistics, and law. She has published in the areas of
translation theory, Chinese legal translation and legal language, and semi-
otic study of Chinese law. Her forthcoming book is entitled Chinese Law:
A Language Perspective, to be published by Ashgate.
Ian Duncansonhas taught at Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic, the University
of Keele and La Trobe University. He has been a visiting scholar at the
University of Edinburgh, Carleton University, Cardiff Law School, Southern
Cross University, and at the Australian Studies Centre, University of British
Columbia. Currently he is Research Associate at the Institute of Postcolonial
Studies, University of Melbourne, and Adjunct Associate Professor in the
Faculty of Law, Griffith University. He was the founder of the annual
Australian Law and Society and Australian and New Zealand Law and
History conferences, both now in their second decades, and has published in
the areas of law and history, law and social theory, jurisprudence and legal
education. Ian is presently working on a project that examines the connection
between the more authoritarian turn in British imperialism following the loss
of the American colonies and the evolution of positivism, hierarchy and sover-
eignty in common law’s relation to its subjects.
viii Biographical Notes
Neal Feigenson is a Professor of Law at Quinnipiac University School of
Law, where he teaches Torts, Civil Procedure, and Evidence as well as
Visual Persuasion in the Law; he is also a Research Affiliate in the Yale
University Department of Psychology. Professor Feigenson’s research inter-
ests include the application of social and cognitive psychology to legal deci-
sion making and the role of visual communication and rhetoric in law. He
is the author of Legal Blame: How We Think and Talk about Accidents.
Other recent and forthcoming publications include ‘New Visual
Technologies in Court: Directions for Research’ (with Meghan Dunn),
forthcoming in Law and Human Behavior; ‘Emotions, Risk Perceptions,
and Blaming in 9/11 Cases,’ forthcoming in Brooklyn Law Review; and
‘The Role of Emotions in Comparative Negligence Judgments’ (with
Jaihyun Park and Peter Salovey) (2001) 31 Journal of Applied Social
Psychology 576.
Richard Foley is a lecturer in English at the Language Centre of the
University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland. His work includes ESP
courses for law students, translation from Finnish into English, and
responsibilities related to the University’s program in Legal Linguistics. He
is currently a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Law, where his research
focuses on modality, terminology, and translation in the EU context.
Celina Frade has a PhD in Linguistics and is Professor of Linguistics at the
Faculty of Letters and Arts, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As
an ESP researcher, mainly legal English, she also designs and delivers ESP
and legal English courses for Brazilian professionals and Law schools in
Brazil.
Joanna Jemielniak is Assistant Professor at the Leon Kozminski Academy
of Entrepreneurship and Management (Warsaw, Poland) and the Chair of
Administrative and Legal Sciences. She specialises in legal theory. Her main
area of research covers contemporary theories of legal interpretation.
Currently she is a visiting researcher (Fulbright fellow) at Harvard Law
School.
Frederick P Lewisis a Professor of Political Science and former Chair of the
Department at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, Massachusetts.
He holds a JD degree from Harvard Law School and a PhD from Tufts
University. His latest book is The Context of Judicial Activism: The
Endurance of the Warren Court Legacy in a Conservative Age.
Ronnie Lippens is a Senior Lecturer at Keele University (UK). His research
interests include imaginaries of law, peace, and justice. He has published
extensively on these issues in a variety of scholarly venues.
Biograhical Notes ix
Aaron RS Lorenz obtained his BA from California State University, Chico
and MA from San Diego State University, both in Political Science. He is
currently completing his PhD in Political Science at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst. Aaron teaches courses at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst in the Department of Legal Studies entitled Lyrics
and the Law and Law and Personal Freedom.
Jill Meyers has a Masters Degree from the International Institute for the
Sociology of Law and is a student in the Law School at the University of
California, Berkeley. She has worked for the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Richard Mohr is a senior lecturer in Law at the University of Wollongong,
Australia, where he coordinates postgraduate research programs. He is co-
director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre at that university. The
research and preparation of his paper was supported by the Public Purposes
Fund of the Law Society of New South Wales (2000, 2002) and by the
International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Oñati, through a research
fellowship in 2001.
Annabelle Mooney is a research associate at the Centre for Language and
Communication Research at Cardiff University working on globalisation,
HIV and quality of life. She also works on the rhetoric of religious cults,
human rights and pragmatics.
William Pencakis Professor of History at the Pennsylvania State University
and served as the President of the Semiotic Society of America in
1999–2000. Among his works are History, Signing In: Studies in History
and Semiotics (Peter Lang, 1993), The Conflict of Law and Justice in the
Icelandic Sagas (Rodopi, 1996), and Reclaiming a Gay Past: History and
Radical Politics in the Films of Derek Jarman (McFarland, 2002). He has
edited special issues of Semiotica(with Brooke Williams, vol 83, 3/4, 1991)
and The American Journal of Semiotics(vol 12, 1995 [1998]) on semiotics
and history. He is also co-editor, with Cindy Palecek, of From Absurdity to
Zen: The Wit and Wisdom of Roberta Kevelson (Peter Lang, 2002).
Richard K Sherwin is a Professor of Law and Director of the Visual
Persuasion Project at New York Law School. He teaches Torts, Criminal
Procedure, Lawyering, and Visual Persuasion in the Law. He recently
established the New York Law School Digital Media Lab. Professor
Sherwin has lectured widely in the US and abroad and made numerous
media appearances discussing topics relating to law and popular culture.
He is the author of When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line between
Law and Popular Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2000) in addition
to numerous interdisciplinary articles and book chapters. Recent and