The Hohfeldian Approach to Law and Semiotics

This Essay attempts to show some of the important connections between the Continental tradition of semiotics, American Legal Realism, and the Critical Legal Studies movement. Semiotics, the study of signs and systems of signification, was developed independently by two thinkers, the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Much of the literature in legal semiotics has followed the Peircian tradition, but ironically, its connections with progressive movements in American legal theory have not always been clear. This Essay offers an alternative way of uniting legal semiotics with legal theory in America. It argues that the line of inquiry begun by Saussure, and continued by the French structuralists and post-structuralists, is not only an especially fertile way of approaching the study of legal semiotics, but that this semiotics can be more readily adapted to understanding politics and ideology as they are expressed in and disguised in legal thought. For this reason, there is a very natural affinity between Saussure\u27s semiology, on the one hand, and the work of the legal realists and the modern Critical Legal Studies movement on the other

Transcendental Deconstruction, Transcendent Justice

A meaningful encounter between two parties does not change only the weaker or the stronger party, but both at once. We should expect the same from any encounter between deconstruction and justice. It might be tempting for advocates of deconstruction to hope that deconstruction would offer new insights into problems of justice, or, more boldly, to assert that the question of justice can never be the same after the assimilation of deconstructive insights. But, as a deconstructionist myself, I am naturally skeptical of all such blanket pronouncements, even - or perhaps especially - pronouncements about the necessary utility and goodness of deconstructive practice. Instead, in true deconstructive fashion, I would rather examine how deconstructionists\u27 claims of what they are doing - which are often refused the name of theory or method - are uncannily altered by their encounter with questions of justice. In fact, as I hope to show, when deconstruction focuses on specific and concrete questions of justice, we will discover that deconstruction has always been something quite different from what most people thought it to be