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Bernard S. Jackson, "Truth or Proof: The Criminal Verdict", International Journal for the Semiotics of Law / Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique Vol. XI no.33 (1998), 227-273: In the light of current controversies in the English-speaking world, this article offers a semiotic analysis of the meaning of the "not guilty" verdict (professionally constructed as relating only to proof), and compares the understanding of the "guilty" verdict (which even professionals construct as making truth claims). The public policy argument is compared to a jurisprudential debate (Kelsen, Bulygin) about the status of facts proved in the legal process and related to philosophical discussion of the nature of "truth". A central, underlying issue is the relationship between language and "reality", so often discussed in semiotics as a problem of conceptualising "reference". Though the emphasis here is on the construction of "concepts" ("guilty", "not guilty"), so that the semiotic analysis focuses largely on the "paradigmatic" axis of signification (that of the semiotic square), it becomes apparent how closely related are the differences in concept construction to the pragmatics of discourse: who is constructing the concepts, and for what purposes. Behind such concept formation, I suggest, there reside implicit narrativisations of pragmatics. The argument is illustrated by reference to the problems surrounding a recent English cause célêbre, the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. e-mail: Bernard.Jackson@man.ac.uk

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