In this paper, the author intends to present an approach against lengthy contracts, judgements, and pleadings. He describes the advantages of brevity, conciseness, and plain English, focusing on research in Israel and abroad. An extreme example of how a whole page may be condensed into one sentence is provided by the author, as well as the opinion of a Supreme Court Chief Justice regarding methods to be used in writing good judgments, and a lawyer’s proposal to summarize pleadings. In the (...) second part of this paper, the author briefly illustrates the differences between three disciplines: Law, Business Administration, and Social Sciences. He proposes that the Law should examine and adopt several elements from other disciplines that can have a positive impact on legal language. (shrink)

Transylvania is a multiethnic society that was part of the Hungarian legal space for centuries. Still, after the WWI, this territory became part of Romania, alongside with a significant number of Hungarian-speaking minority population. What happened with Hungarian as a legal language after the annexation of Transylvania to Romania? The article deals with the history and current status of Hungarian legal language in Romania, emphasizing the frequent contradictions between legal texts and realities, the importance of political context, and fluctuations in (...) the minority rights. The focus is on two problems: the language of legal education and the language of the court proceedings. There are arguments brought to prove the conditionality between these two at the intersection of history of legal education and minority rights. (shrink)

This chapter develops an account of the meaning and use of various types of legal claims, and uses this account to inform debates about the nature and normativity of law. The account draws on a general framework for implementing a contextualist theory, called 'Discourse Contextualism' (Silk 2016). The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the apparent normativity of claims of law from a particular contextualist interpretation of a standard semantics for modals, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. (...) Though the semantics is descriptivist, it avoids Dworkin’s influential criticism of so-called “semantic theories of law,” and elucidates the nature of “theoretical disagreements” about the criteria of legal validity. The account sheds light on the social, interpersonal function of normative uses of language in legal discourse. It also gives precise expression to Hart’s and Raz’s intuitive distinctions among types of legal claims (internal/external, committed/detached), while giving them a uniform type of analysis. The proposed semantics and pragmatics of legal claims provides a fruitful framework for further theorizing about the nature and metaphysics of law, the relation between law and morality, and the apparent practical character of legal language and judgment. Discourse Contextualism provides a solid linguistic basis for a broader account of legal discourse and practice. (shrink)

The author discusses the role of language within law, and the role of philosophy of language in understanding the nature of law. He argues that the major re-thinking of the common and `common sense' views about law that have been proposed by various recent legal theorists are unnecessary.

This paper examines Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of Giorgio Agamben's account of the history of bio-politics in the Beast and the Sovereign. In this account, the ‘threshold of bio-political modernity’ is identified with the collapse of an allegedly immemorial distinction between life and the law. According to Derrida, however, this in-distinction between life and the law, which supposedly marks the historical emergence of the bio-political, is in fact an originary event. Agamben, therefore, announces a bio-political modernity that has always already existed. (...) In this essay, I argue that Derrida, in the Beast and the Sovereign, fails to grasp the significance of one of the principal figures employed in Agamben's theory of the bio-political, the ‘threshold’. This figure, which Agamben opposes, elsewhere in his writings, to the Derridean notion of difference/deferral, does not refer to either an historical beginning or something that has always already existed. Rather, the threshold is defined as a particular moment in which an originary phenomenon becomes a decisive historical norm. In his ‘history’ of the bio-political, therefore, Agamben identifies the modernity of the latter in terms of the historical normalization of an in-distinction between law and life that has always already occurred. (shrink)

This book is a survey of how law, language and translation overlap with concepts, crimes and conflicts. It is a transdisciplinary survey exploring the dynamics of colonialism and the globalization of crime. Concepts and conflicts are used here to mean 'conflicting interpretations' engendering real conflicts. Beginning with theoretical issues and hermeneutics in chapter 2, the study moves on to definitions and applications in chapter 3, introducing cattle stealing as a comparative theme and global case study in chapter 4. Cattle stealing (...) is also known in English as 'rustling, duffing, raiding, stock theft, lifting and predatorial larceny.' Crime and punishment are differently perceived depending on cultures and legal systems: 'Captain Starlight' was a legendary 'duffer'; in India 'lifting' a sacred cow is a sacrilegious act. Following the globalization of crime, chapter 5 deals with human rights, ethnic cleansing and genocide. International treaties in translation set the scene for two world wars. Introducing 'unequal treaties' (e.g. Hong Kong), chapter 6 highlights disasters caused by treaties in translation. Cases feature American Indians (the 'trail of broken treaties'), Maoris (Treaty of Waitangi) and East Africa (Treaty of Wuchale). (shrink)

Introduction EMPIRICISM DOES NOT stand in very high repute among literary theorists these days. Regarded generally as a discredited philosophical paradigm ...

This is a compilation of extracts from instructive cases, as well as authoritative commentary, on the roles of language and ethics in law. The book touches on aspects of language and ethics, including professional responsibility, decision making, methods of perception, and concepts of reality.

This volume highlights important aspects of the complex relationship between common language and legal practice. It hosts an interdisciplinary discussion between cognitive science, philosophy of language and philosophy of law, in which an international group of authors aims to promote, enrich and refine this new debate. Philosophers of law have always shown a keen interest in cognitive science and philosophy of language in order to find tools to solve their problems: recently this interest was reciprocated and scholars from cognitive science (...) and philosophy of language now look to the law as a testing ground for their theses. Using the most sophisticated tools available to pragmatics, sociolinguistics, cognitive sciences and legal theory, an interdisciplinary, international group of authors address questions like: Does legal interpretation differ from ordinary understanding? Is the common pragmatic apparatus appropriate to legal practice? What can pragmatics teach about the concept of law and pervasive legal phenomena such as testimony or legal disagreements? (shrink)

Legal texts are in the focus of both lawyers and translators. This paper discusses the binary opposition of these two views especially in the light of contract law. There is one crucial epistemic difference between the point of view of the translator and the lawyer when it comes to the interpretation of legal texts. In the translator’s view legal text is traditionally conceived as static as to its nature; something that already exists in the form of text. Traditionally, the translator (...) is interested in the text itself as it was written down in a document, i.e. the translator needs to go back to the frozen moment when a legal document was constructed and finalised. The lawyer, in contrast, is very much interested not only in the text of the legal document but also in the contextual surroundings of the text. In fact, for legal interpretation, sometimes the key-elements for the interpretation come from outside of the text itself. This paper concludes that legal translation is in many cases closer to transcreation than it is to traditionally understood translation. (shrink)

Mark Platts is responsible for the first systematic presentation of truth-conditional semantics and for turning a generation of philosophers on to the Davidsonian program. He is also a pioneer in discussions of moral realism, and has made important contributions to bioethics, the philosophy of human rights and moral responsibility. This book is a tribute to Platts's pioneering work in these areas, featuring contributions from number of leading scholars of his work from the US, UK and Mexico. It features replies to (...) the individual essays from Platts, as well as a concluding chapter reflecting on his philosophical career from Oxford to Mexico City. Mind, Language and Morality will be of interest to philosophers across a wide range of areas, including ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of law, and philosophy of language. (shrink)

This paper constitutes a critical exploration of the functional features underpinning the unconscious of institutional attachment—namely an attachment which is understood in terms of the subject-infant’s love for his institutional parent-power holder, and the indefinite need for a subject to remain within its infantile condition under the parenthood of the State. We venture beyond the Paternal metaphor and move towards the neglected metaphor of the Mother, so focal in the individual process of identification, assumption of language and the permanent attachment (...) to the space of prohibition and Law. A new position in Language is defined. To understand how the psychic space of the infant is artfully subjugated in the making of the Western culture and domination of the Western system of legal interpretation, an enquiry into the legal emblematic history of representations is necessary to map the process through which the subject learns its legal self and relationship with otherness through what Pierre Legendre coined as the Occidental Mirror and the triangular logic of reflexivity. A final enquiry interrogates the way the legal institution places itself in the position of the specular image that captivates the subject-infant within a procreated legal order, a law-giving and law abiding life starting from the laws of the familial structure reinforced by the role of the parents and by analogy, by the State assuming that role in the institutional life of the ad infinitum infant. (shrink)

This paper analyses two methods commonly used to understand legal language: deontic logic and the analysis of concepts taken as fundamental for any one or more areas of the law (sometimes called the philosophical foundations of law project). In doing so I introduce what I call the phenomenon of linguistic regress, and I do so in order to show why and how these methods necessarily fail as theories of legal language. I argue, in short, that any form of content-determination of (...) concepts or norms fails as a method for understanding legal language because of the phenomenon of linguistic regress. Given the failure of these two methods, I argue that legal theorists should instead adopt an approach that focuses on explaining the community-based use of commonly-recurring terms and phrases found in legal language - a use, furthermore, that is most commonly exercised by legal experts (of varying degrees of skills), operating in different and interacting contexts of expertise (judicial, legislative and scholarly), and more broadly, as members of a legal community not impervious to influence from other kinds of communities. (shrink)

Human rights discourse has been likened to a global lingua franca, and in more ways than one, the analogy seems apt. Human rights discourse is a language that is used by all yet belongs uniquely to no particular place. It crosses not only the borders between nation-states, but also the divide between national law and international law: it appears in national constitutions and international treaties alike. But is it possible to conceive of human rights as a global language or lingua (...) franca not just in a figurative or metaphorical sense, but in a literal or linguistic sense as a legal dialect defined by distinctive patterns of word choice and usage? Does there exist a global language of human rights that transcends not only national borders, but also the divide between domestic and international law? Empirical analysis suggests that the answer is yes, but this global language comes in at least two variants or dialects. New techniques for performing automated content analysis enable us to analyze the bulk of all national constitutions over the last two centuries, together with the world’s leading regional and international human rights instruments, for patterns of linguistic similarity and to evaluate how much language, if any, they share in common. Specifically, we employ a technique known as topic modeling that disassembles texts into recurring verbal patterns. The results highlight the existence of two species or dialects of rights talk—the universalist dialect and the positive-rights dialect—both of which are global in reach and rising in popularity. The universalist dialect is generic in content and draws heavily on the type of language found in international and regional human rights instruments. It appears in particularly large doses in the constitutions of transitional states, developing states, and states that have been heavily exposed to the influence of the international community. The positive-rights dialect, by contrast, is characterized by its substantive emphasis on positive rights of a social or economic variety, and by its prevalence in lengthier constitutions and constitutions from outside the common law world, especially those of the Spanish-speaking world. Both dialects of rights talk are truly transnational, in the sense that they appear simultaneously in national, regional, and international legal instruments and transcend the distinction between domestic and international law. Their existence attests to the blurring of the boundary between constitutional law and international law. (shrink)

One of the most striking experiences of my early days as a postgraduate student of medieval Scots law was an encounter with a twelfth-century charter which, apart from being written in Latin, might have served as a model or template for the land transfer documents which I had learned how to draft the previous year in the undergraduate class called Conveyancing. Alliterative thoughts came into my head—conveyancing, conservatism, consistency, continuity—but also the question of when this seeming stability was first achieved, (...) and how it crossed from Latin into the formal Scots-law English of my own day. Joanna Kopaczyk’s fascinating study of legal language in Scottish towns from the late middle ages to the Reformation in Scotland does not address the conveyancing question but it raises similar issues about legal and administrative record-keeping, addressing them from the perspective of historical linguistics. She is interested in the tendency of both law and language towa .. (shrink)

Some legal philosophers regard the use of deontic language to describe the law as philosophically significant. Joseph Raz argues that it gives rise to ‘the problem of normativity of law’. He develops an account of what he calls ‘detached’ legal statements to resolve the problem. Unfortunately, Raz’s account is difficult to reconcile with the orthodox semantics of deontic language. The article offers a revised account of the distinction between committed and detached legal statements. It argues that deontic statements carry a (...) Gricean generalized conversational implicature to the effect that the rules in question reflect the speaker’s own commitments. Detached legal statements are made when this implicature is either explicitly cancelled or when the conversational context is sufficient to defeat the implicature. I conclude by offering some tentative reflections on the theoretical significance of deontic language in the law. (shrink)

An original and comprehensive study of the history, symbols and languages of the common law tradition.

The subject of the article is the concept of a universal language and a reflection on its importance for law. The starting point is a presentation of the history of the concept of a common language for all mankind, a concept that has always accompanied man – it is present in the Bible, in the ancient writings of Near Eastern peoples, it was alive in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, and it experienced its particular heyday – among other (...) reasons because of the gradual abandonment of Latin as the language of science – in the seventeenth century, an age that was reformist by definition. Since its inception, the concept of a universal language has been inextricably linked with the idea of world peace and universal happiness for all people. It is significant that in most universal language designs, regardless of the era, there were, to a greater or lesser extent, references to the utility of such languages for law. The author, tracing the development of the concept of a universal language, focuses on its fullest contemporary development: Esperanto. Esperanto, like previous universal language designs, places particular emphasis on ideas linked to the concept of a universal language, especially the idea of peaceful coexistence and understanding between peoples. In this context, it is reasonable to ask what role Esperanto can play in the development of certain branches of law, especially international law. Given the position of English as the language of legal acts of international importance, the answer to this question is currently not clear. (shrink)

Social conventions are those arbitrary rules and norms governing the countless behaviors all of us engage in every day without necessarily thinking about them, from shaking hands when greeting someone to driving on the right side of the road. In this book, Andrei Marmor offers a pathbreaking and comprehensive philosophical analysis of conventions and the roles they play in social life and practical reason, and in doing so challenges the dominant view of social conventions first laid out by David Lewis. (...) Marmor begins by giving a general account of the nature of conventions, explaining the differences between coordinative and constitutive conventions and between deep and surface conventions. He then applies this analysis to explain how conventions work in language, morality, and law. Marmor clearly demonstrates that many important semantic and pragmatic aspects of language assumed by many theorists to be conventional are in fact not, and that the role of conventions in the moral domain is surprisingly complex, playing mostly an auxiliary and supportive role. Importantly, he casts new light on the conventional foundations of law, arguing that the distinction between deep and surface conventions can be used to answer the prevalent objections to legal conventionalism. Social Conventions is a much-needed reappraisal of the nature of the rules that regulate virtually every aspect of human conduct. (shrink)

This volume is the second part of a project which hosts an interdisciplinary discussion about the relationship among law and language, legal practice and ordinary conversation, legal philosophy and the linguistics sciences. An international group of authors, from cognitive science, philosophy of language and philosophy of law question about how legal theory and pragmatics can enrich each other. In particular, the first part is devoted to the analysis of how pragmatics can solve problems related to legal theory: What can pragmatics (...) teach about the concept of law and its relationship with moral, and, in particular, about the eternal dispute between legal positivism and legal naturalism? What can pragmatics teach about the concept of law and/or legal disagreements? The second part is focused on legal adjudication: it aims to construct a pragmatic apparatus appropriate to legal trial and/or to test the tenure of the traditional pragmatics tools in the field. The authors face questions such as: Which interesting pragmatic features emerge from legal adjudication? What pragmatic theories are better suited to account for the practice of judgment or its particular aspects? Which pragmatic and socio-linguistic problems are highlighted by this practice? (shrink)

It was a tenacious dream: the first language spoken by man was music, poetry and science, all at the same time. In the beginning the same word, given by God or dictated by Nature, stood for things, feelings and laws. And in the cherished image of this dawning faculty not only had the distinction between word and song, the difference between expressive power and objective designational power (or “referential function,” as the linguists say) not yet appeared, but the sacred and (...) profane uses of speech had not yet established their separate kingdoms: in the great festival of the earliest days each word was a celebrant and contained the substance of reality. The word, invested with an integral meaning, hit the mark and rejoiced at the contact. Everything to which man gave a name was a god to him or the delegate of a god, so that by virtue of a benevolent revelation or of an exact inspiration the earliest vocal expression combined the fullness of knowing with the musical fullness of its expressive power. But this language of Paradise, witness to an age when man was not separated from man or removed from Nature or from God, has long been forgotten, dismembered, dispersed. Multiple and incompatible idioms have taken its place. The clear light of meaning has become clouded. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Stewart R. Sutherland LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION IN CRIME AND PUNISHMENT OF some novels it is possible to argue with justification that the problems of interpretation and understanding begin on the first page. Of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment it is possible to contend that the problems of interpretation and understanding begin on the title page. The terms "crime" and "punishment" are overtly moral. The novel is read in the context (...) of a title which exhibits its values where they may be seen by all. What significance must we attach to the choice of such a title? It is possible that the title gives to us a characterization of the content of the novel which, retrospectively, we can only regard as either self-consciously ironical, or perhaps pathetically so, but how are we to decide whether this is more than a possibility? Having raised this question, I propose to set it aside in the hope of returning to it equipped with the experience derived from a number of literary and philosophical digressions. The literary and conceptual style of critical comment upon a novel often betrays much that is definitive of the response being elucidated. If one compares and contrasts Philip Rahv's essay on Crime and Punishment with the appropriate chapter of Mochulsky's Dostoevsky,2 the implication of this general claim may be clarified. My intention here is to use largely ostensive means to suggest the radically different accounts of the novel given to us by these two writers. That the conclusions are different is hardly in need of statement. What is worth examining is the character of the language and of the arguments used to substantiate those conclusions. The point of my discussion will rest not upon assessing the accuracy or legitimacy of particular judgments, but rather upon delineating the general contours of the intellectual contexts in which these judgments are offered. 223 224Philosophy and Literature Rahv's focus is on the character or psyche of Raskolnikov. The novel is seen largely in the form of a psychological study of the mind of the murderer. He reminds us that a central problem for Raskolnikov, for the reader, and for Dostoyevsky himself, is the identification of Raskolnikov's motive—not that there is an absence of motives, indeed quite the reverse: "He is soon lost in the maze of his own motivation" (p. 20). His mind spins incessantly upon an axis the nature of which is nowhere made unambiguously apparent. Nor, it seems, can we replace our search for a motive, or the sufficient reason for action, by identifying a supreme assertion of will: again, on the contrary, we are told, "Dostoyevsky is the first novelist to have fully accepted and dramatized the principle of uncertainty or indeterminacy in the presentation of character" (p. 21). Despite that, however, the success of the novel rests upon Dostoyevsky's skills in allying the insight "... that human consciousness is inexhaustible and incalculable" (p. 19), to "his capacity to combine [seeming contradictions] in a single brain and a single psyche, while staving off the danger of incoherence at one end and of the specious reconciliation at the other..." (p. 38). The mood ofRahv's treatment of the novel is dominated in this way by the language of (largely popularized) psychology—"pathological depression," "nameless guilt-feelings," "wishful fantasy"—and not surprisingly, he sees his own preoccupations as mirroring those of Dostoyevsky: "What Dostoyevsky has done in revising Raskolnikov's justification is to convert into a theory of human nature what is in Hegel not a psychological theory at all but a theory of men as subjects and objects of history" (p. 34). Mochulsky, on the other hand, breathes a very different atmosphere. From the outset he talks of "the spiritual existence of Dostoyevsky's heroes," and he says of a man who wills a murder or one who "betrays himself to the powers of dark necessity" (pp. 302-303), "The murderer has stepped beyond something more than the moral law: the very basis ofthe spiritual worlditself" (p. 303). "The whole tragedy of man-godhood," he tells us, "is expressed in these few words: 'It seems to me,' Raskolnikov says, 'truly great people experience an immense... (shrink)

To find adequate answers to a changing reality heavily influenced by advances in technology, medical professionals have developed and adopted an array of terms that have brought new concepts into the profession. “Dignity,” “vegetative state,” “futility,” “double effect,” and “brain death” have become indispensable words in the medical setting. In the following discussion, the attention is on terminology. If we believe in phenomenology, the assumption is that we should closely reflect on the words we use in all spheres of life, (...) especially in those that concern life and death. This article calls for a sincere discussion about these terms and concepts. The thesis put forward is that the language in the medical setting serves primarily the physicians, at times at the expense of the patients’ best interests. This language and the concepts it describes have generated an unhealthy atmosphere for patients, which might lead to undesirable actions at the end of patients’ lives. (shrink)

This study describes metonymic argument alternations, in which a constructional slot can be filled by any of a set of semantic roles that index one another, and provides a diachronic corpus analysis of two such alternations in French. In the Reveal secret frame and other communication frames, the Medium can indexically replace the Speaker and the Topic can indexically replace the Information. A regression analysis shows that while topic for information metonymy is more syntactically and pragmatically restricted, medium for speaker (...) metonymy has seen an increase in usage over time across the frame. This change is related to sociocultural developments and has implications for the study of figurative language and lexical semantic change. While it is well understood that figurative mechanisms such as metonymy affect language change, here it is demonstrated that cultural shifts drive changes in metonymies themselves, with corresponding impacts for linguistic structure. (shrink)

In recent years, foreign language learning has been proposed as a possible cognitive intervention for older adults. However, the brain network and cognitive functions underlying FLL has remained largely unconfirmed in older adults. In particular, older and younger adults have markedly different cognitive profile—while older adults tend to exhibit decline in most cognitive domains, their semantic memory usually remains intact. As such, older adults may engage the semantic functions to a larger extent than the other cognitive functions traditionally considered the (...) most important. Using anatomical measurements and a cognitive test battery, the present study examined this hypothesis in twenty cognitively normal older adults, who participated in a two-month Italian learning programme. Results showed that the immediate learning success and long-term retention of Italian vocabularies were most consistently predicted by the anatomical measures of the left pars orbitalis and left caudal middle frontal cortex, which are implicated in semantic and episodic memory functions. Convergent evidence was also found based on the pattern of cognitive associations. Our results are consistent with a prominent role of semantic and episodic memory functions in vocabulary learning in older learners. (shrink)

The ancient dualism of a sensible and an intelligible world important in Neoplatonic and medieval philosophy, down to Descartes and Kant, would seem to be supplanted today by a scientific view of mind-in-nature. Here, we revive the old dualism in a modified form, and describe mind as a symbolic language, founded in linguistic recursive computation according to the Church-Turing thesis, constituting a world L that serves the human organism as a map of the Universe U. This methodological distinction of L (...) vs. U helps to understand how and why structures of phenomena come to be opposed to their nature in human thought, a central topic in Heideggerian philosophy. U is uncountable according to Georg Cantor’s set theory but Language L, based on the recursive function system, is countable, and anchored in a Gray Area within U of observable phenomena, typically symbols, prelinguistic structures, genetic-historical records of their origins. Symbols, the phenomena most familiar to mathematicians, are capable of being addressed in L-processing. The Gray Area is the human Environment E, where we can live comfortably, that we manipulate to create our niche within hostile U, with L offering overall competence of the species to survive. The human being is seen in the light of his or her linguistic recursively computational mind. Nature U, by contrast, is the unfathomable abyss of being, infinite labyrinth of darkness, impenetrable and hostile to man. The U-man, biological organism, is a stranger in L-man, the mind-controlled rational person, as expounded by Saint Paul. Noumena can now be seen to reside in L, and are not fully supported by phenomena. Kant’s noumenal cause is the mental L-image of only partly phenomenal causation. Mathematics occurs naturally in pre-linguistic phenomena, including natural laws, which give rise to pure mathematical structures in the world of L. Mathematical foundation within philosophy is reversed to where natural mathematics in the Gray Area of pre-linguistic phenomena can be seen to be a prerequisite for intellectual discourse. Lesser, nonverbal versions of L based on images are shared with animals. (shrink)

The animating idea behind this book is that “a better understanding of linguistic communication may help us to a better understanding of legal regulation” . While for Marmor the philosophy of language has played a foundational role in the philosophy of law, The Language of Law is concerned more narrowly with “linguistic communication as a means of conveying legal content” . In preliminary statements Marmor foregrounds his interest in “the linguistic aspects of legal directives”, specifically “the boundaries between linguistic and (...) normative considerations in the inference to legal content of statutory law”. The aim is to articulate “how the legal determinants work” . These linguistic questions, Marmor argues, can be considered independently of any theory of law or of the nature of legal philosophy. His assumption is that “we can make some philosophical progress by paying close attention to the kind of speech acts that legal enactments are” . The underlying issue .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Theorizing the Language of LawJesús Rodríguez-Velasco (bio)Law transforms reality, de iure and de facto, inasmuch as it attempts to bridge the gap between that which is done de facto and that which is regulated de iure. It is standard practice, for Alfonso X of Castile,1 to reinvent the means of writing the law. He does not limit himself to compiling or revising existing legal statutes; rather, he elevates the (...) corpus of the law to the level of juridical science. Dominating the meaning of the word—its hermeneutics and its relation to truth, lies, rhetoric, history, and poetry—is also the key to dominating juridical discourse itself and its capacity for creating certainty. Or, at least, for controlling uncertainty. Uncertainty, that is to say, the ambiguity in the interpretation of the relationship between words and things, appears to be one of the targets of Alfonsine juridical science.It is in the institutions that one can best study this desire for control. In particular, the need for control becomes visible in the court and the places related to it (the palace, chamber, or bedroom), codified by the law in order to put justice into action, in the representation of power, in cultural exchange, in education, and in recreation. Here legislation acquires a special significance with respect to the word, to narration, and to rhetoric. This is a philological problem: How does one compose and administer a text capable of controlling its own interpretation? How does one transpose this same dynamic to the institutions? How does one transmit this notion from the institution to those who inhabit it and who are, after all, the subjects of the legal science?It is therefore fitting to examine legislation about legal discourse, which is, in itself, the theory of law—not, however, in its abstract aspects but rather in the concrete elements of the formation of a legal vocabulary, in the way in which words, whose semantic and hermeneutic problems are clear, give life to this legal vocabulary. How is legal discourse constructed? In what way is it transmitted? What are the consequences of its dissemination? In what way is the law in charge of words, in particular, those expressed in the institutions?Perhaps the problem is philological, in the sense supposed by Giambattista Vico. Vico, in his Principi per una scienza nuova [1: 10] proposed that the study of philosophy, as a science of truth could not exist independently without a philology, the origin of the conscience of certainty (coscienza del certo). Attaching myself, then, to this idea of certainty (although not, of course, from Vico’s perspective) throughout this study I shall call “the space of certainty” the theoretical and conceptual construction (which is of both a philological and textual character) stipulated by the legislator in an attempt to control the distinct concepts related to the legal word, its institutional statute and its legal, moral, and cultural hermeneutics. I shall thus attempt to understand the meaning of this space of certainty, in what way it has been constructed, and how it affects legal, political, social, and cultural mechanisms. [End Page 64]1Law and KingIn the first title of the first Partida, Alfonso outlines the virtues of the laws.2 In addition, this first law discusses the overall structure of the Siete partidas, as if, in fact, they were nothing more than a lengthy and virtuous discourse about the law. It makes sense as the Partidas are not only a legal code capable of being enforced but also an enormous manual on legal theory. The law(s) and legal doctrine, then, come together to form the first expression of legal science. Going further than compilations of Roman law such as the Liber augustalis,3 further than the scientific expressions of jurisprudence of specialists from Bologna, the Île-de-France, and Orleans utroque iure,4 the Partidas—and I should like to insist on this—can be considered a constitutional legal text. In this sense the Partidas attempts to regulate the actual material from which the laws are made: language. Put another way, the text of the Partidas is at once legality, establishment, and discussion of legal language... (shrink)

Proper words in proper places, remarked Dean Swift, make the true definition of style. According to this definition, John Sparrow fully qualifies as a stylist. His skillful compound of wit, pungency, and accurate observation, his irreverence, his ear for language and hatred of cant are unsurpassed. This book brings together pieces broadcast by the BBC, a series of lectures at the University of Chicago, and, even, a university sermon. It proves that John Sparrow is one of those rare people whose (...) spoken words lose none of their power when translated to the printed page. (shrink)