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Deborah Charles Publications

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique

Abstracts of articles appearing in Vol. X no.30 (1997)

Christopher Stanley, "Antigone Within the Walls of House" (231-259): This essay is part of a project in which I am working toward the 'grounding' of a cultural politics of difference on an ethics of alterity (respect). This is a violence involved here operative at a number of levels. Principally, I am interested in utilising transgression as a strategy to interrupt the tyranny of repressive representation (law and society) in a move toward a non-violent configuration of justice in community. In this essay I argue for the relation between the political and the ethical to be implicated in this resistant strategy whilst maintaining awareness of the making of 'work' of justice and community. In utilising the figure of 'Antigone' mourning beyond the city wall of the polis and the art-installation 'House' , I am able to argue that mourning is a significant move in the articulation of this strategy in the sense of being a communal act of notifying the absence of presence and the closure of return. Mourning 'Before the Law' in the non-coercive act of remembrance for the silenced and in the recognition of the lack between selves in the sharing of difference (being in common as being in-difference) involves a compearance Before the Law (the tyranny of singular judgements premised on universal norms - the injustice of the Law of the polis) and that this 'sharing of voices' on a space Before the Law (the heterotopia, the benign space of proximity) signifies a politics of transgression grounded on an ethics of difference.. e-mail: stanlec1@westminster.ac.uk

Baudouin Dupret, "La Définition Juridique des Appartenances. La typification narrative de l'action identitaire devant les juridictions suprêmes d'Egypte et d'Israël" (261-291): Visions of the other are implicitely embedded in the identity constructs which interaction leads many actors to mobilize. Illustrated by two cases decided by the Supreme Court of Israel and the Cairo Court of Appeal, this article attempts to examine how judicial institutions are induced to pronounce on questions dealing with the definition of membership, its modalities and its legal consequences. The analysis of such narrative typifications of actions asserting identity is conducted by drawing upon two theoretical materials: on the one hand, the notion of legal repertoire and the game of occasional substantialisation of preexisting normative forms; on the other hand, works in legal semiotics dealing with legal narrativity. Two types of conclusion emerge, the one focusing on the narrative modes of legal construction, their constitution, their coherence, and their conflictuality, the other turning on the functionality and modalities of the mobilisation of law in interactive processes of identity construction.

Baudouin Dupret, "La Définition Juridique des Appartenances. La typification narrative de l'action identitaire devant les juridictions suprêmes d'Egypte et d'Israël": Des visions de l'altérité se retrouvent implicitement dans les constructions identitaires que l'interaction conduit des acteurs à mobiliser. Prenant l'exemple de jurisprudences de la Cour suprême d'Israël et de la Cour d'appel du Caire, cet article tente d'examiner comment des institutions judiciaires sont amenées à se prononcer sur des questions touchant à la définition de l'appartenance, à ses modalités et à ses conséquences juridiques. L'analyse de cette typification narrative de l'action identitaire est menée à l'aide de deux matériaux théoriques: d'une part, la notion de répertoire juridique, avec ce qu'elle suppose comme jeu de substantialisations ponctuelles de formes normatives préexistantes; d'autre part, des travaux de sémiotique juridique touchant à la narrativité du droit. Des conclusions de deux types en ressortent: les unes portent sur les modes narratifs de construction juridique, leur constitution, leur cohérence et leur conflictualité, tandis que les autres touchent davantage à la fonctionnalité et aux modalités de mobilisation du droit dans les processus interactionnels de construction identitaire. e-mail: dupas@dvlp.ucl.ac.be

Necati Polat, "The Law and its Readings: Realism, Verifiability, and the Rule of Law" (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

John C.W. Touchie, "Jackson on the "Decisions" Underlying the Application of Rules" (317-335): This paper argues that Bernard Jackson's discussion of the application of "pure" propositional logic is fundamentally flawed. It examines the nature of the "decisions" that Jackson claims are a necessary concomitant of factual determinations of the predicate, and argues that if Jackson's analysis is correct, then contrary to Jackson's assertions, these "decisions" must also be made within the sphere of "pure" propositional logic. It further argues that Jackson's seemingly unobjectionable claims concerning the "decisions" that have to be made when applying rules have substantial, but frequently overlooked, implications for rule-based conduct governance and the notion of following and applying a rule, one of these being that the question of whether or not there is a "decision" to be made in applying a rule can only be determined by turning to an examination of its content and the environment to which it refers. Finally, a more general argument is made against Jackson's position by relating his claims to discussions of the philosophical notion of intentionality. The paper concludes with the suggestion that Jackson's arguments rest on unjustifiable, though commonly employed, assertions concerning the necessary conditions for intentionality.

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