Semiotics and legislation Book

Language is central to the nature of law. For that reason, law may be regarded as a semiotic system. Legal semiotics appear to provide an attractive point of departure for interdisciplinary research and may offer an interesting contribution, from a new point of view, to the issues of the law's efficacy and legitimacy. This collection of lectures is based upon a colloquium on the theme "Semiotics and Legislation" held on September 26, 1997. The open forum at this colloquium provided the participants with the opportunity to find out whether these approaches to legal communication significantly overlap at critical junctures or diverge at important points. In this way, the collected lectures allow for a complementarity of views that prelude a much needed comprehensive picture of the theory of legal communication.