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Necati Polat, "The Law and its Readings: Realism, Verifiability, and the Rule of Law" , International Journal for the Semiotics of Law / Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique Vol. X no.30 (1997), 293-316: Realism bases its rule-scepticism chiefly on the generality of the propositions of law. The essay argues, on the other hand, that the generality argument follows from a formalistic conception of the rule of law. This conception presupposes a characteristically unrealistic dichotomy between the law and its readings, the text and its interpretations. The essay discusses Paul de Man reading Rousseau on laws. It then passes on to indicate the pictorial notion of language which underlies the dichotomy. To probe into the realist predicament premised on a markedly formalist, pictorial notion of language, the essay focuses on the writings of Scandinavian legal realists, to whom a critique of legal language from this perspective has been far more central than in American legal realism. The critical attitude towards legal language by Scandinavian legal realists ­ which is not dissimilar to the critique in Wittgenstein's early work ­ is contrasted with the approach favoured by the later work by Wittgenstein on rule-government. While the early work assumes an intrinsic relationship between language and its other, the rule and that which agrees with it, the later work refers to a relationship that is more political, or made, than technical. Concluding, the essay builds on deconstructive strategies to briefly sketch a concept, or non-concept, of the rule of law which will hint at the true dimensions of the violence that in each case characterizes the rule of law. e-mail: polatn@rorqual.cc.metu.edu.tr

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