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Bernard S. Jackson, "Legislation in the Semiotics of Law", in Hanneke van Schooten, ed., Semiotics and Legislation. Jurisprudential, Institutional and Sociological Perspectives, 5-26: This paper seeks to develop further the claim that the legal system comprises a series of interacting "semiotic groups". In the broadest of terms, the definition of a semiotic group is a group which makes sense (here, of law) in ways sufficiently distinct from other such groups as to make its meanings less than transparent to members of other groups without training or initiation. All aspects of sense construction may, in principle, contribute to the judgment that a particular group is distinct. Many studies of the language of law have focused upon lexicon (vocabulary) and syntactic structures as characterising legal language, and as creating a barrier between lawyers on the one hand and the public on the other. In this paper, I suggest that a focus on the pragmatics of legislation is equally important; indeed, it may well be at this level that differences between distinct semiotic groups operating within the law are more readily analysed. The problem of the semiotics of legislation is thus not to be conceived as restricted to the problem of the transmission of the content of legislation. It also includes messages regarding the force, status and "quality" of the legislation. But such notions as force, status and "quality" are not inherent in the text (semantics) of the legislation; rather, they derive from different aspects of the use of the legislation (its pragmatics). In thinking about the problems of transmission of legislation, we neglect changes in the pragmatic context at our peril. The paper considers, inter alia, the relationship between the semantics and pragmatics of legislation in "simple" societies; the differences in modalities (including aesthetics) applied to legislation in different discourses; differences in the constructiom of its binding force; and differences in the construction of its authenticity. On this last point, a more detailed account of the position in the U.K. may be found in my recent article: "Who Enacts Statutes?", Statute Law Review18/3 (1997), 177-207. e-mail: Bernard.Jackson@man.ac.uk

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