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William E. Conklin, "The Transformation of Meaning, Legal Discourse and Canadian Internment Camps", International Journal for the Semiotics of Law / Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique IX/27 (1996), 227-256: This essay examines how the lawyer reads a social event through secondary signifying relations. The event is a signified event. The legal discourse displaces the meanings which a non-knower embodied through her/his own language. As a consequence an untranslatable gap lies inside the legal discourse of a modern state. A law suit involves two types of harm: the indigenously experienced harm, such as an assault or breach of contract; and the harm brought on through the displacement of meaning in the legal discourse itself.
The Paper exemplifies the claim with reference to the displacement of the embodied meanings of internees in Canadian internment camps, during the Second World War and its aftermath. The legal discourse signified certain citizens and landed immigrants as "persons of Japanese ancestry". The professional knowers - the lawyers and judges - read this sign in the 'context' of the sign, "emergency." An "emergency" signified that the Federal Parliament and its agents could legislate authoritatively when, under non-emergency conditions, only the Provinces could do so. The signified 'fact' of an emergency was immersed into familiar chains of other signs.
As juridical agents traced such signs backwards through institutional history, the embodied meanings of the internees were forgotten, lost, dispersed. The re-signification of the internees became the event. The juridical agents took their chains of signs as constitutive of the true/real. Force seemed 'natural' in such a world. But in displacing the embodied meanings of the aggrieved, the knowers' discourse failed to respond to the language of the non-knower. The juridical transformation of meaning was complete. The prospect of a dialogic legal order is raised.
The author is University Research Professor, 1996; and Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Windsor.

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