Special Issue of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law: “The Reasonable Interpreter. Perspectives on Legal and Non-Legal Semiotics”
Edited by Angela Condello, Paolo Heritier, Massimo Leone & Jenny Ponzo
The origin of the present issue lies in a number of questions which intersect both the fields of semiotics and of legal philosophy and theory, especially concerning the nature and function of languages, and the function of reasonableness and interpretation in the balancing of conflicting values. Can we consider semiotics as an autonomous discipline, with its own objects, issues and methods—or should we (instead) consider it as a field of study, a catalogue of undetermined and undefined interests, uneasy to be made homogeneous and to reunify? Following the last option, questions that are structural for semiotics are, for instance, at the core of the legal operations and of both traditional and innovative approaches to legal theory and practice. With such transdisciplinary attitude, we imagined a double-sided Roundtable (Turin, 19–20 September 2020), with participants working both in semiotics and legal philosophy, aimed at delving into questions such as: What is the role of reasonableness in legal hermeneutics today? Is the digital revolution having an impact on the production of legal knowledge and—if so—can semiotics enrich the analysis of such impact and transformation? In other words: how are legal and non-legal semiotics connected today? And can this relationship be traced back to antiquity? What is the relationship between the semioticians’ legal semiotics and jurists’ legal semiotics?
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