Description
This book argues that structural semiotics provides crucial insights which may enrich both our theoretical accounts of legal phenomena and our observation and description of the phenomena themselves. Two themes run throughout: first, that we should consider seriously the implications of linguistic skepticism in general, and doubts about the status and place of “reference” in particular; second, that abandonment of the reification of law as an object of study, and substitution of a discursive framework, leads to an appreciation of the multiplicity and complexity of signifying practices within what we conventionally call a “legal system.” The argument is pursued primarily through consideration of one particular legal phenomenon — adjudication in court. For many, this has achieved the status of the paradigm of legal activity — and this, paradoxically, as much as a result of the work of the American “Legal Realists” as of traditional positivists. This book puts into relief the complexity of this activity of adjudication, in contrast to the formalist account provided by the theory of the “normative syllogism.” This complexity consists not merely in the different signifying practices encountered in the many different interactional contexts which make up this “activity”; it is constituted also by the inevitable involvement within these discursive practices of non-legal structures of understanding. In short, “narrative coherence” structures the intelligibility of both fact and law in the adjudicatory process.
Published by Deborah Charles Publications
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Table of Contents
Chapter One: AN INTRODUCTION TO LEGAL SEMIOTICS AND NARRATIVE MODELS OF LEGAL DISCOURSE
1.1 Some Characteristics of the Anglo-American Law of Evidence
1.2 American Legal Realism: Gestalt Theory and Socio-Linguistics
1.3 Narrative Models in Recent Jurisprudence
1.4 An Outline of Greimasian Semiotics
1.5 The Narrativisation of Pragmatics in the Common Law Trial
Chapter Two: THE NORMATIVE SYLLOGISM AND THE PROBLEM OF REFERENCE
2.1 The Problem
2.2 Strawson on Reference
2.3 Attribution and Reference: Searle v. Donnellan
2.4 The Theory of Denotation
2.5 The Coherence Alternative
Chapter Three: THE NARRATIVE MODEL OF FACT CONSTRUCTION IN THE TRIAL: SEMIOTICS AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
3.1 Introduction
3.2 The Narrative Theory of Bennett and Feldman
3.3 Difficulties in Bennett and Feldman’s Account of Courtroom
Interaction
3.4 Weaknesses in Conceptual Structure
3.5 Comparison with Story Grammars and Semio-Narrative Structures
3.6 Remedying the Weaknesses in Bennett and Feldman
Chapter Four: NARRATIVE MODEL IN LAW CONSTRUCTION AND APPLICATION
4.1 The Elements of the Model
4.2 Law, Fact and Application in Decision-Making
4.3 The Narrative Form of Rules
4.4 Narrative and Adjudication
4.5 Narrative and Doctrine
4.6 Oppositional Categories and Narrative Patterns
4.7 Narrativisation of the Pragmatics of Law Construction and Application
Chapter Five: INTERPRETATION AS JUSTIFICATION
5.1 Elements of the Positivist Model of Interpretation
5.2 The Unity and Identity of the Legal System
5.3 Decision-Making and Interpretation
5.4 The Autonomy of Legal Reasoning
Chapter Six: NARRATIVE, HISTORY AND TRUTH
6.1 The Concept of Narrative
6.2 Hayden White’s Compromise
6.3 History and the Narrativisation of Pragmatics
Chapter Seven: LEGAL SEMIOTICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAW: POSITIVISM, DECONSTRUCTION AND CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES
7.1 Legal Semiotics and Legal Positivism
7.2 Semiotics, Deconstructionism and Critical Legal Studies
7.3 Legal Semiotics: Transformative or Nihilist?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SOME INTER-DISCURSIVITIES (Index)
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