Semiotic analysis of law

iiiABSTRACTSEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF LAWErtuğrul UzunDepartment of Common LawAnadolu University Institute of Social Sciences, March 2006Supervisor: Doç. Dr. Yasemin IşıktaçSemiotics may be defined as the studying of signs and system of signs used incommunication. There are two main traditions in semiotics, one is known asstructuralist semiotics developed by A. J. Greimas depending on structural linguistics ofF. de Saussure and Lévi-Strauss? structural anthropology; the other is C. S. Peirce?ssemiotic theory known as logical semiotics. Applied to law, law is seen as acommunicational phenomenon.Structural legal semiotics seeks to understand the construction of meaning at the deeplevel of legal discourse. The deep level of discourse is modeled upon the deep level ofsemantics and consists in the interplay of syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. Theparadigmatic axis is used to explain the ideological elements of the discourse.Logical legal semiotics rejects the idea that law is made up by legal rules or codes,expressing that meaning can only be possible by the conception of practical affairs.Thus, the judge is assumed as the principle legal actor who reaches a decision through asequence of interpretive choices. This idea gives rise to a realistic understanding of lawas happened in the case of American Legal Realism.Under the light of legal semiotics, it is possible to show that legal realism is moreadequate to explain the characteristics of law, even in continental legal systems whichhave codes supposed to be the main source of judicial decisions. Therefore, it should beconsidered that a theory of law shall be a theory of adjucation and interpretation. Legalsemiotics also shows that there is no method of reasoning and interpretation whichexclusively belongs to law to be named as legal reasoning and legal interpretation.