Abstract
Contemporary meta-dogmatic legal discourse has frequently mobilized the signifier “translation”, in different stages and to face diverse problems ─ the multidirectional interactions between legal language and ordinary language, the plural network of (national and international, state and non-state) legal orders, the dialectics between presupposed legal materials and practical controversies, the intersubjective place of the judge as the impartial third, the invention of exemplarity as concreteness ─ always however with decisive projections in the understanding or experiencing of juridicalness (its aspirations, categories and limits). The purpose of this paper is to explore the claims to inter-semioticity which the mobilization of this signifier and the plurality of its contexts of meaning and performance seem to construct. This means, on the one hand, to resume the dialogue with Boyd White (justice as translation) and François Ost (le droit comme traduction). It also means, on the other hand, returning to the counterpoint between translation and tradition which MacIntyre’s narrativism exemplarily proposes (Whose Justice? Which Rationality?), this time to discuss the relevance of treating Law (a certain Law) as a cultural artifact, i.e. as a non-universal (culturally plausible and civilizationally moulded) answer to the universal (anthropologically necessary) problem of the institutionalization of a social order (law as a form of life, as a project and as a tradition). With an unexpected helping hand coming from Greimassian’s semio-narrative, this means also asking if translation (or the ethics of humility it celebrates) can actually be experienced, in our limit-situation, as the resource (if not the place or the environment) of a plausible intercultural dialogue.
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
As a time of successive linguistic turns (and heterogeneous experiences of textuality), creating (and recreating) diverse resources and framework possibilitiesFootnote 1, but mostly as a time of radical reflection on Otherness ─ seeking to “associate the difference in sign regimes with the difference in state of affairs”, as well as to intertwine the sets of occasions for the creation of meaning with the plurality of possible forms of life (demanding a “transition between different ontological regimes”) [3: 75] ─, ours is unavoidably a time (or an Age) of translation, if not of translational recreation. And yet, to acknowledge this specific feature of our present condition opens up an ensemble of different interrogations (or levels of interrogation), the most significant of which is surely the one that asks whether we can attribute to translation, as far as Humanities or even Social Sciences are concerned, the quality of a transversal integrative paradigm. Answering this question actually involves two complex fields of reflection: the first focussing on the signifier “paradigm” (paying attention to the importance of limiting its use, thus avoiding the abuses that trivialize and mischaracterize it), the second concerned with the performative contexts of the so-called Age of translation, asking what the relevance and reciprocal weight of its inspiring poles of emergence are (or could or should be) ─ these involving, on the one hand, cultural anthropology and indigenous ethnology and, on the other hand, moral, political and juridical narrative philosophies, as well as comparative historical civilizational analysis. If this concern opens the doors to an indispensable interdiscursivity (the context of which establishes, moreover, a kind of global framework), the path which I propose means choosing (modestly?), without forgetting these challenges, another starting point, and with it, an alternative (expected) leading question.
The starting point is actually a simple and indisputable ascertainment: contemporary meta-dogmatic legal discourse, exploring however different stages and facing diverse problems (thus fully justifying the pragmatics of plurality that characterizes it), has frequently mobilized the signifier “translation”. Notwithstanding this plurality of contexts (concerning both meaning and performance, aspirations and borders), do those mobilizations in juridically relevant contexts of the signifier “translation” build or allow an effective claim to inter-semioticity, i.e. a productive exploration of inter-semiotic aspirations? This is obviously the expected leading question. Once this starting point and its correlative interrogation are admitted, the answering path to be pursued justifies (almost naturally) two asymmetrical steps, the first (very restrainedly) alluding to some major distinct examples of the meta-dogmatic use of the signifier “translation” [Using the signifier translation], the second admitting that the implicit (but also the explicit) claims to inter-semioticity which those examples manifest (all of them as claims concerning the “identity” and the “place” of Law or a certain Law) may be intertwined in a plausible (and productive) argument of continuity in order to construct a research agenda and its work in progress [Reconstituting Law as a Form of Life, a Project and a Tradition].
1 Using the Signifier Translation
Five diverse uses are here considered, all of them as opportunities to recap, in a sequence of brief flashes, expected (more or less well-known) dialogues.
1.1 Justice as Translation
The first one considers Boyd White’s approach (Justice as translation), certainly not by chance, since we have here the most extensive and integrated use of the possibilities of the signifier. It could be said that it is just a matter of illuminating the relationship between two distinct languages, and yet the reconstitution of the correlative movement, in its permanent reinvention (from common language to legal language, and from legal language back to common language) [38: 36], justifies not only a global conception of praxis and practical discourse, but also an experience of law as a way of life and a system of meaning. Concerning this global conception, the core is certainly the defence of narrative as the archetypal form of praxis and practical thinking [38: 175], the revaluation of which not only imposes an alternative type of discourse and rationality (justified as a productive encounter of phronêsis and aesthesis, of practical-normative and cultural-literary discourses) but also opens up a renewed experience of community and communitarian meaning (the community as (…) a group of people who tells a shared story in a shared language)[38: 172]Footnote 2. As far as the second dimension is concerned, the movement between languages gains a specific intelligibility, based on the binomial law as literature /literature as law and the successful heterophonic development of its components (we must read law as a kind of literature, we must read literature as a kind of law) [38: 122–123, 131; 39:16–20]Footnote 3. At last the intertwinement of these two dimensions (the global and the specific ones) combines a conception of translation ethics (in its constitutive requirement of humility) with a critical reconstruction of Law as a “complex intellectual, ethical and imaginative activity”, inseparable from a continuously inventive culture of argument and its set of “dynamic and dialogic” (translational) tensions [41: 34, 42]. This means treating Law as a set of occasions and opportunities for the creation of meaning”[40: 52], but also as “a rather fragile piece of our culture, requiring those who live with it to remake it constantly, over and over” [41: 44].
1.2 Law as Translation: Three Thematic Cores
Notwithstanding its concentration in the juridical arena, the dialogue with François Ost brings us no less than three new uses of the signifier translation, thus establishing indispensable bridges with the issue of legal pluralism and with the institutional and methodological situations of jurisdictio [28: IX-XXIV; 29: 9 ff., 13–35, 88 ff.; 30: 57 ff., 66–82, 98–106, 341–344]. This means autonomizing three decisive thematic cores and the exercises in translation that they demand, namely,
-
a)
The one which is required by the plural network of (national and international, state and non-state) legal orders ([cherchant] la grammaire du “droit en réseau”) [29: 11],
-
b)
The one which the judge’s modus operandi (interconnecting the world of practical controversies and legal materials) manifests (lorsque le fait et le droit sont rapprochés (…) au terme de la double opération de qualification du fait et d’application-interprétation de la loi) [29: 31]Footnote 4,
-
c)
And the one which this same judge develops whilst assuming his/her role as third (“le tiers qui triangule le différend opposant les parties [et qui traduit] (…) leurs discours dans le langage de la loi commune”) [29: 91].
1.3 Two Complementary Meanings
By recalling that this thirdness (also as a fonction tièrce “internalized by legal subjects”) [30: 57 ff.] is precisely the feature which distinguishes Law, its discourses and practices (Le droit ou l’empire du tiers), we are certainly ready to move forward, explicitly considering the issue of inter-semioticity. Before that step, I shall however add two last uses of the signifier “translation”, bringing non-negligible complements to the previous ones.
Whilst exploring the implications of a methodological approach (and its concentration on a “theory” of adjudication) to thematize Law’s specific aspirations (if not its archetypal concept), the use of translation can be productively justified to express the conversion of unrepeatable singularity (“uniqueness”) into analogically comparable concreteness (and exemplarity), a conversion that is fulfilled when the event-problem (deprived of the full blossoming of its incomparable “novelty”) becomes a juridically relevant case: this means actually involving the content of the “legal materials” (seriously taken as a pluri-dimensional legal system) to respond (not as an unilateral application but as a dialectically conceived experimentation) to methodological issues of “relevance” and “qualification”, whilst experiencing comparability as the decisive manifestation of Law’s specific thirdness [18: 90–98; 24: 154–165; 1: 175 ff., 308–313].
Last but not least, the use of the signifier is also fully pertinent when we consider the possibilities of intercultural dialogue, not just as a component of the global practical-cultural reflective horizon but also as a procedure constitutively incorporated by juridical discourse. This is for instance the case when we consider the method of “legal chorology”: according to this method, to translate means to “dismantle” a “regime of sensorial invisibility” whilst pursuing the goal of “redefining in a non-ethnocentric way the significance of people’s behaviours before the multiplicity of national laws” and this is a goal which (providing human rights with new possibilities in the acknowledgement and treatment of differences) promises a significant renewing and deepening of democratic practices and institutions [31: 1–27,125–204].
2 Reconstituting Law as a Form of Life, a Project and a Tradition
Notwithstanding the obvious plurality of contexts and conceptions, do those mobilizations of the signifier “translation” allow a productive exploration of inter-semiotic aspirations? The return to this main question could (and perhaps even should) be fulfilled by delving into the differences (only touched on) that separate the examples that were selected. The path I propose is however another one.
It is as if, without failing to recognize the differences (and to admit that another occasio may explore them justifiably in detail), we could here and now start from the undisputable acknowledgment that all the uses at stake have decisive projections in the understanding or experiencing of juridicalness (its aspirations, categories and limits), which after all is the same as simply admitting that the claim to inter-semioticity which matters here is strictly the one that can simultaneously be said a claim of juridical relevance. Is this a redundant assumption? I would say rather that it is an assumption which gives us the cue to proceed … and in a relatively unexpected way: the intention (although without any guarantee of a unanimous outcome) is certainly the search for a plausible integrating or aggregating assimilation of the previous meanings (produced in diverse juridical contexts), the reflective horizon in which this search is inscribed demands however an enlargement of scope, favouring an answer which may go beyond the institutional situations of juridical environment. It is to meet this requirement that I proceed by recalling a certain counterpoint between translation and tradition: more precisely the one which MacIntyre’s narrativism exemplarily proposes (Whose Justice? Which Rationality?).
2.1 Translation and Tradition (“Listening” to MacIntyre)
I must clarify right away that my purpose is not to explore the possibilities and limits of this counterpoint (and the link between tradition and rationality that it presupposes) while I discuss MacIntyre’s narrative philosophy and the conception of community that it urges us to acknowledge. I admit that it could be productive here and now to thematize this very special return of a conception of communitas, on the one hand in its contrast with the experience of a tradition-independent societas (which not only the Enlightenment’s moral enquiry but also the post-Enlightenment relativism and perspectivism seem to justify), and on the other hand in the specific type of practical rationality that its reinvention of a continuum phronesis/sophia (prudentia/sapientia) demands, whilst conjugating an Agustinian and Thomist reflexive heritage with an explicit diagnosis of plurality and particularism (and the corresponding societal challenges). Even acknowledging the undisputable productivity of this reconstitution, my purpose is actually another. I will consider selectively and allusively some of the precious contributions attributable to MacIntyre’s approach of the counterpoint tradition/ translation, less however to explore them as autonomous categories of intelligibility (in its specific context-horizon or reflexive agenda) but rather to combine them with other (more or less heterogeneous) contributions and thus arrive (through a new top-down dive into the specificity of the practical world of Law) at a distinct (but integrating or agglutinating) meaning of the signifier “translation”.
2.2 What Contributions am I Referring to?
-
1)
First of all, I would highlight an understanding of tradition as an argument or as an ensemble of arguments, if not as a pathway which, while it exists (or is practically-culturally assimilated or performed), we could say continuously pursued (and thus recognized in their constitutive iterability), but none the less permanently reinvented, under the fire of external and internal interpretative debates: “A tradition is an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two types of conflict…” [22: 12].
-
2)
I consider, secondly, the time of determination and recognition (if not awareness) of that persistence or iterability: “Traditions are defined retrospectively. It is only on looking back that the unity of a project to which over considerable stretches of time there have been many different contributors, each with their own goals and concerns, becomes apparent…” [23: 165].
-
3)
The third remark is a complement to the previous one and draws attention to the importance that, as far as tradition is concerned, the so-called “conflicts with external critics and enemies“[22: 12] constitutively have. “When (…) [the tradition becomes apparent], it is sometimes because of some challenge (…) from outside it, a challenge that awakens in those whose lives and work are informed by that tradition a new awareness…” [23: 165]. As if these challenges made their adherents aware that all of them, whatever their differences, are contributing to the same enterprise.
-
4)
What comes next is the well-known recognition of the capacity that traditions have to “listen” to what is said in another tradition (despite the possible untranslatability or incommensurability that separates them): this means actually admitting rare but crucial types of situations justifying a judgement of superiority of resources (“by the standards of one’s own tradition”, the other tradition “seems” to offer “superior resources for understanding the problems and issues which conform one own´s tradition”) [22: 370], or even beyond that (and more globally), the conclusion-claim arguing that the only rational way for adherents of one tradition to approach their rivals is the one which “allows for the possibility that, in one or more areas, the other tradition may be rationally superior to it” (“in respect precisely of that in the alien tradition which it cannot as yet comprehend”) [22: 388].
-
5)
Last but not least, we have the (even most well-known) acknowledgment that there is no equidistant (tradition-free) tertium comparationis or meta-discursive horizon (every perspective, presupposition or category of intelligibility is actually produced within a specific tradition, is as such, tradition-bound) the “standards” which determine what is and is not “meaningful” as well as “the standards of good translation” are “internal to languages” [22: 370 ff.].
These are the contributions which I would like to emphasize (even if perfunctorily). As I have already said, the purpose is to combine them immediately with other (relatively heterogenous) elements….
2.3 The Three Vertices and Their Specifying Role: A Research Agenda
Beyond the thematic core which the intertwining tradition/translation justifies, two other unmistakable cores will be at stake here: the first (a very composite one) mobilizing the signifier “form” or “way of life” (and the plurality of contexts it allows), the second (in contrast, a very specific one) developing a concentrated meaning of the signifier project (inseparable from the “signifiers” practical circularity and constitutive historicity and involving as such a permanent re-writing of memory). To conjugate these three cores (and their centripetal dynamics) means actually defending that our contemporary limit-situation needs a reflexive (if not reflexively radical) experience of Western Law which, taking the autonomy of its aspirations seriously (both in themselves, as practical commitments or desiderata, and in their effective social institutionalization) treats this Law simultaneously and inextricably as (a) a (communitarian) form of life, (b) a practical project and (c) a tradition (this one retrospectively attributed to a rigorously located context of emergence, taking us back to the 2nd century B.C. and a certain Roman “rise” of the jurists) [13, 16].
2.3.1 The Conditions of Possibility
An ensemble of transversal components, all of them highlighted as (convergent) conditions of possibility (each of them in itself necessary and insufficient), allow this treatment, not only opening up the doors to the subsequent distribution among the three vertices but also clarifying that this distribution, far from tolerating closed thematic compartments, has a purely analytical relevance.
What transversal components and justifying what conditions? I would say that we have three steps here, with the first identifying a broad territory of conceptions of Law and the next two introducing-adding (comprehensive) specifications that successively reduce the extension of this territory.
-
(1)
The first step is the one which defends that the experience of Law and Legal Thinking (eventually also that the construction of the concept of Law) should be sustained on an archetypal or aspirational internal perspective ─ so that the identity features to be reconstituted (concerning the autonomy, specificity and limits of juridical arenas, its goals and/or values, its general or specific practical cultural meaning, as well as the intentions of legal thinking) do not represent all or nothing characteristics but rather guiding intentions or constitutive aspirations or promises (eventually commitments or desiderata), “by reference to” which (as if in an exercise in gradations) past or present expressions and their institutional instances should permanently be “judged”Footnote 5.
-
(2)
The second step (introducing a specification that, within the spectrum that the first could accommodate, already excludes a significant number of perspectivesFootnote 6!) imposes in turn the challenge that the determination/concretization/performance of the aspirations or practical commitments in question should be fulfilled through a dominantly material or substantive discourse.
-
(3)
The last step (perpetrating a much more drastic specification … whilst excluding most of the candidates peacefully included in the previous ones!) requires that the experience of the (so-called) aspirational substantive approach and its contexts of justification ─ despite the vocation of universality that, especially at certain moments in its historical trajectory, is constitutively-dogmatically associated with it ─ is (should be) meta-dogmatically reconstituted (not only in terms of specific contents but also in terms of warranting grounds or foundations) in contexts of intelligibility and justification explicitly (consciously) free from claims of (a-cultural) universality or (ontological or onto-anthropological) necessityFootnote 7.
According to this last step. it is as if, productively refuting the aphorism ubi societas, ibi jus [25: 287-289], we were consciously fighting against a kind of dominant flow which, despite its plurality, continues to rely (to say it with Charles Taylor’s formulations) on a culturally neutral (or a-cultural) perspective [36]. On the positive side, this obviously means demanding that the combination (if not overlapping) of the three vertices (form of life, project, tradition) is pursued not only in the name of a full historical-cultural contextualization (with identifiable conditions of emergence and diverse cycles of institutionalization), but also explicitly and decisively fed by an understanding of juridicalness which, reconciling the claims of autonomy and substantive validity, can sustain these claims (or their conjugation) as correlates of an argument of historical-cultural continuity ─ so that all these claims and arguments (and the corresponding acquisitions) can be significantly experienced as constitutive cultural artifacts and as performative guiding elements of a non-necessary and non-universal (culturally plausible and civilizationally moulded) answer (among other plausible answers) to the universal (anthropologically necessary) problem of the institutionalization of a social order. This means that we need a metadogmatic (legal-philosophical) discourse explicitly addressing (explicitly reconstituting) ─ as well as questioning the practical-cultural survival of ─ a certain Law: the one that, from Roman isolation onwards (from the “first known” expression of “humanism” onwards) [8: 12], we may treat as a (persistently reinvented) manifestation of the Western Text…
Admitting that this is a complex research agenda (to be pursued on other stages), what follows is nothing more than a very brief sampling of the specifying role played by these three vertices (with a more attentive consideration of the third, which is directly linked to the meaning “translation”).
2.3.2 Law as a Form or Way of Life
Concerning the first vertex of the triangle, the assimilating centripetal force comes from the plurality (and the circulation) of contexts (of meaning and performance) with which the corresponding signifier is expected to intervene.
Although concentrated on an immediately socio-cultural, if not anthropological-cultural, intentional content — free (freed!) from the constructive hesitation that the reception of Philosophische Untersuchungen [42] has raisedFootnote 8 —, the signifier at stake in fact mobilizes two diverse organizing axes. These are in fact sufficiently open and flexible in their intension and sufficiently broad in their extension to be able to evoke:
-
(a)
on the one hand (with the help of Wittgenstein), the inventio or concipere or the “presentation” of a language ([u]nd eine Sprache vorstellen heißt, sich eine Lebensform vorstellen) [42: 24 (II § 19)]— if not also already of a game of language (das Sprechen der Sprache [ist] ein Teil (…) einer Tätigkeit, oder einer Lebensform) [42: 28 (I § 23)]… — and with this creation-invention (without thereby diminishing the plausibility of a critical openness and its infinite argumentation), also the indispensability of a dogmatic stabilization and its finite argumentation (Das Hinzunehmende, Gegebene —könnte man sagen—seien Lebensformen) [42: 363 (II, xi)];
-
(b)
on the other hand (combining contributions as heterogeneous as those by Boyd White, Landowski, Bubner and Castanheira Neves!), an order-ordinans of “occasions” or “opportunities for creating meaning” (law not as a system for producing material results in the world, but as a system of meaning) [40: 52], opportunities all of them organic-structurally institutionalized (although offering distinct normative-intentional modalities of “existence” and bindingness) [26: 241], which, when lived from the inside (viewed from the inside, by someone who lives on its terms, and thus seen as a field of life and practice) [40: 103]— whilst imposing themselves on us (also under a strictly semiotic point of view) as practical-existential expressions or resources (il y a place, en sémiotique, pour la vie!) [12: 2]Footnote 9—, establish on the horizon of their communitarian meanings (as a reference to a commune that is always also a search for that commune) an unmistakable culture of argument (“perpetually remade” by the subjects who participate in it) [38: 215–237].
It is precisely the culture of argument which distinguishes Western Law and that the vertex Lebensform claims to illuminate, whilst selecting as a kind of a generating component the invention of the case-controversy… and allowing as such the retrospective (narrative) acknowledgement which takes us back to a certain republican “rise” of the prudentes or iuris consulti. It is as if we were recognizing a culture of argument distinct from all other cultures of argument and the (ethical or philosophical) thematizations that consecrate them; but also as if we were recognizing an equally differentiated language, which (being homologous to common language) [26: 230–251, 282–283], establishes specific (autonomous) links with everyday practice and its existential dispositions, if not, in a word, with the particularity and concreteness of the human life-world (Lebenswelt) [2]. This is, I think, a very productive visée, giving the corresponding cultural artifacts (or chain of artifacts) an unmistakable weight: as if we were testifying to the beginning of an autonomous, practical world and simultaneously acknowledging its continuity and permanent transformation, but also its fragility. The opportunity is not in fact only that of testifying to the invention of a specific problem of inter-subjectivity or comparability, involving two subject-parties and an impartial third, it is rather that of following the institutionalization (the emergence and the work in progress) of a microscopic model of community (of thirdness) which relativizes the subjects (which interrupts the face-à-face immediately experienced in the subjects’ encounter) and which, as such, justifies the emergence of an entirely new practice of respondereFootnote 10.
This is a respondere which, as far as virtues are concerned, may be treated on the one hand as a specification of phronesis, and on the other hand as an emergence and development of humanitas. That specification of phronesis brings actually the dogmatic stabilization of thirdness (as a common context-order, made of differently binding normative materials, either treated as a catalogue or as a system) and with it… (among others!) the overcoming (if not the refuting) of a respondere which could appear (as it was the case with the pontiffs’ responses) as a self-sufficient (causa sui) expression of an inspired voluntas, a change of emphasis concerning the temporal dimension (highlighting the constitutive present of the controversy to be assimilated)Footnote 11, last but not least, the possibility of distinguishing concreteness from singularity, i.e. an analogically comparable concreteness from pure, unconditional and absolute singularity [18]. However, this specification of phronêsis would not be identifiable if it represented less of a specification of humanitas, a word invented in this contextFootnote 12 to translate the consecration of a community of comparable equals, namely a community which the Roman Republic could only conceive of as an implacably circumscribed circle (overlapping an explicit status civitatis and the munus of paterfamilias), the intentional meaning of which represents however a remarkable acquisition, opening up the way to a specific institutionalization of audiatur et altera pars and thus to the consecration of a pragmatic of respect (considered as a source of normative claims). In this work in progress, distinct experiences of dignity are inscribed and overlapped (from the juridically intrinsic dignity as rank to the juridically assimilated dignity as value) [19, 37], without forgetting, however, that the decisive role is played precisely by a specific experience of the subject-person ─as an axiological autonomous artifact-acquisition, significantly different from the ethical, moral, philosophical, religious or political conceptions of personhood developed by the same Western canon.
2.3.3 Law as a Project
The knotty point of the second vertex lies in the formulation projecting (explicitly borrowed from Heidegger’s understanding of constitutive historicityFootnote 13) or, more directly, in the way the signifier projecting (mobilizing explicit signifiers justified by an experience of Geworfenheit-thrownness) identifies the development of a practical-cultural autonomous circle as a simultaneous experience of throwing and being thrown (within its own throw), with the coherent refusal of necessity and contingence [7: 142–148, 310–316 (§§ 31 and 63)] Footnote 14.
As this projecting rejects the pre-determined nature of a plan (in the ontic or ontic-teleological pre-modern sense of a universal a-historical order of excellences), as well as rejecting the identity of a programme (in the contingent-pragmatic sense which modern Zweckrationalität self-sufficiently justifies)Footnote 15, we can say in two words that its precious contribution concerning the identity of Law lies precisely in its capacity to experience the permanent constitutive tension between continuity and change — involving a communitarian self-availability which is simultaneously and inextricably self-transcendentality.
This treatment of the communitarian meanings, in its juridical relevance, as a self-transcendentally conceived artefactus, actually opens different stimulating analytic opportunities. Two examples must suffice here.
The first one (a specific one) concerns the claim for consonance between juridical normative principles (taken seriously as foundational warrants) and adjudicative practices and allow us to explore the practical circularity which, as a true experience of constitutive historicity, interchanges and overlaps the tasks-roles of guiding and guide-following, specifying and transforming, fixing and developing, and these ones whilst involving on the one hand the governing normative context offered by principles and on the other hand the determining dynamics imposed by problem-solving practices — here precisely as the novum introduced by principled realization, i.e., by the practices which follow those principles (and whilst they follow them) [17].
The second example is a global (and certainly a more decisive one), whilst regarding the construction of the so-called argument of continuity. To understand this argument (and the productive intertwinement that it attributes to the different historical cycles), it is in fact essential to allude to the outlines of a certain dialectical counterpoint. This is the counterpoint which emerges when we distinguish the core of law’s project — identified as a continuous attempt to institutionalize a specific kind of intersubjectivity (between relativized, comparable and limited spheres of autonomy and responsibility and the corresponding masks of subjects-persons) — from the different cultural, political and economic environments in which this tentative institutionalization has been (and continues to be) pursued — and where we may recognize a situated context of questions and problems (conditioning the criteria and the balance of comparability, whilst still able to identify the autonomous sense of “this” specific comparability as an unmistakable task of ius suum cuique tribuere) [19: 273, note 25].
2.3.4 Law as a Tradition
What about the last vertex, treating the continuity of these responses as a retrospectively reconstituted tradition? Beyond the five contributions which we have already considered when we invoked MacIntyre (or as a synthesis of their overlapping), I would highlight another reflective opportunity, which submits the argument of continuity to a negative challenge. More than the “conflicts with external critics and enemies” that we have already considered, the negative challenge brings to the fore the problem of the limits of Law or this problem under the fire of a radical thematization. The attention paid to difference could not actually be taken seriously without explicit consideration of its radicalization or reflexive intensification, which brings us to a troubling borderline area where the possibility of the practical-cultural self-availability of identifiable projects overlaps with the demands of a contextually plausible decay, erosion or overcoming (progressively threatening the sustainability of the invoked argument of continuity).
One step further and we will be considering the so-called debate of alternatives to law [15], at least in the terms that Castanheira Neves teaches us to recognizeFootnote 16. And yet, here it interests us less the conceivable alternative responses developed in the Western canon ─opposing to Law’s order of validity the order of necessity justified by pure power, the order of possibility rationalised by techno-science, the order of finality supported by politics [25], eventually the order of incomparability justified by ethics (or a certain ethics) [15]─, than the responses constructed under alien civilizational horizons and which expose Western Law to the demanding challenge of inter-cultural dialogue — such as those that may be found in the orders of the Islamic Sunna, Navajo beehaz’aanii or Hindu sanatana dharma.
It is true that the internal debate itself can be thought of in the light of the translation paradigm ─ with the productive implication of allowing us to distinguish traditions within traditions … and of drawing the corresponding steps or gradations (a resource which can also be useful to distinguish the different historical cycles and their diverse legacies, namely those which we can retrospectively attribute to pre-modernity and to Aufklärung). When the intercultural dialogue is in action (when the responses assumed by the Western canon are confronted with alien responses), the model of translation gains however an unmistakable intelligibility and intensity. The heterogeneity (if not incommensurability) at stake concerns here actually a counterpoint between a response that bets (that assumes le pari, in the well-known Pascalian sense) on the separability or autonomy of a certain practical world (instituting the subject-person of comparability) and another ensemble of responses that consider the same problem of life in common whilst assuming a demand for inseparability and the holistic solution of a practical continuum — a kind of horizon-ethos in which communitarian morality, religious (and mystical) practices, shared narratives, concepts of good life, self-understanding exempla and other social canons are experienced as constitutively inseparable and law (or the corresponding order) is not a specific identifiable (separable) voice (determined by an explicit claim to autonomy) but only a (relatively effective and subsidiary) regulative or coercive projection of the content of this continuum. It is precisely because this inter-cultural dialogue is (or should be) explicitly pursued without the a-problematic presupposition of a trans-civilizational meta-discourse that the translation model becomes indispensable here.
Concerning this model, I would like to highlight two performative resources, the first an internal one, considering the possibilities of juridical principles (seriously taken as jus and thus also explored as intentions of realization or practical commitments, in the light of an aspiration for practical consonance with the novum introduced by the practices which follow them), the second an external one, exploring the possibilities of Greimassian narrative grammar and the way this articulates analytical tools and empirical claims to explore speech behaviour and meaning construction processes.
The first ensemble of possibilities provides an eloquent specification of the claims for cultural humility, sincerity and creativity with which Boyd White identifies the “ethics of the translator” [39]. We have here actually a process or path of translation that is entirely nurtured by (and pursued through) an experience of practical circularity: the experience which, as we have already said, involves on the one hand the governing normative context offered by the aspirations or commitments of the principles (assumed as prius interrogandi in the immanence of their Lebensform, project or tradition) and on the other hand the determining dynamics imposed by certain problem-solving practices — practices whose specificity and novelty coincide precisely with an irreducible emergence of Otherness, as a configuration of problems and material reality presuppositions dominantly built and exposed from the perspective of another way of life, project or tradition, thus bringing with it the challenges and ways of resistance of alien arguments, warrants and aspirations. As if the aspirations and desiderata of the juridical principles (in a way which other systemic legal materials would allow only with difficulty) had found for once their performative context in practices which dominantly resist them and which at least implicitly manifest alternative aspirations (thus providing a precious field of experimentation of the convergences and differences, when not différends) [14, 17].
But there is also the possibility of an external mediation, which, as I have already anticipated, can find an eloquent resource in the semio-narrative. The patrimony of informative contents that this narrative grammar (preserving its external point of view) can offer to philosophical-legal reflection focused on the cultural-civilizational identity of Law as a form of life, as a project and mainly as a tradition (as an internal reflection which, as we have seen, appears dominated by the thesis of the artefactual “nature” of Law and the need to consider exclusively a certain Law) is, in fact, absolutely crucial [20]Footnote 17. There is first the accessible organization of the empirical stock of social knowledge ─ concerning the contingently historical material presupposition (or its ensemble of political, economic and cultural experiences and frames, if not pre-judgments or stereotypes) ─ that the so-called thematic level (justifying the convergence of nomological and narrative resources) is able to offer. And yet the specific productivity of the intervention of narrative grammar is actually beyond this organization of the informative stock. We can actually say that this specificity is mostly due to the possibility of submitting all these contingent empirical data (including those which describe the content of messages expressing aspirations or conclusion-claims to validity) to the possibilities of the so-called deep level and its tools. Here, it matters little if the proposed tools, demanding the interplay of two axes (the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic) are effectively protected by the conclusion-claims of universality, naturalness or empirical corroboration that, in one way or another, this semiotic trend defends. Regardless of the success or failure of these claims, the tools at stake – and most especially the syntagmatic axis, whilst allowing us to reconstitute the construction of meaning in a three-part narrative sequence (contract /performance /recognition) – proves to be especially apt to make available the informative dimension which the consideration of a practical-cultural project (seriously taken as an institutionalized form of life and significantly defended as a specific tradition… and not only as an episodic or contingent manifestation) certainly needs. It is true that the common association of the Greimasian narrative syntagm (semio-narrative stricto sensu) with a teleological representation of human action may raise some difficulties. This frequently explored association – as well as the acronic pretension linked to the “elementary structures of signification” in general – do not, however, prevent what seems fundamentalFootnote 18: the very promising possibility of (always from an unequivocal external perspective and through an analytically constructed game of objectification) treating the hard core of that project, its aspirations and its sense-effects ─ i.e. the ensemble of signs or traces which appear in the initial stage and which persist as more or less explicitly constitutive features of identity in the subsequent trajectory ─ under the mask of a plausible actant, i.e. inscribed in the process of interaction which entrusts this actant with the role-mask of a Sender (“Thus, a ‘Sender’ may even be an impersonal agency, a custom, a social force”) [11: 148]. This means distributing the other diagnosed contextual elements (the unrepeatable “material” realities, involving diverse social-institutional and cultural-ideological factors or dimensions) across the remaining actants and across the distinct situations of the narrative sequence, giving also specific attention to the game of choices and alternatives which the paradigmatic axis and its semiotic square productively allow. All this without excluding another possibility concerning the syntagmatic axis: the possibility of recovering the Helper-Opponent pair of actants beyond the level of “competences required to perform action” (savoir-faire/pouvoir faire) ─ this possibility can actually be particularly productive when we want to weigh the obstacles posed by the diagnosis of the alternatives to Law or by the narratives about practical-cultural decadence, erosion or death of its project…Footnote 19 This external objectivation is actually precious for the development of an internal radical reflection that, as an intertwinement of commitment and critic, developed (lived) from the inside by those who take Law as their form of life ─ i.e. as a specific way of creating intersubjective meanings, following a persistent, albeit permanently reinvented, claim to autonomyFootnote 20─, dares however to question the plausible contemporary endurance or congruence of the form of life itself ─ i.e. dares to explore the meaning of its argument of continuity and as such discuss the persistence or the survival of jus and its practical world, all this without avoiding the possibility of a negative answer. Contemporary intercultural dialogue needs actually, more than ever, the cultural humility which sustains this reflection.
Notes
The sequence is well known (speech act linguistic turn, New Hermeneutics’ turn, deconstructive turn, narrative turn, literary turn, aesthetic turn, visual turn), even though each of its stages (whilst starting a new path with many possible answers, but also whilst reciprocally intertwining and overlapping) hardly admits a univocal characterization. This is further aggravated by the projections in Legal Thinking of all these proposals.
This is an experience freed from the dogmatic pre-determined search for a unique language (the dogmatic search that the axes of episteme and techné-episteme, as non-narrative modes of speaking, invariably and a-critically impose), but also an experience which, as interpretative pragmatics or performance, gives methodological priority less to the hermeneutical reading situation than to a microscopic rhetorical circumstance (understood as the possibility of “establishing or losing community”) [38: 3–5; 39: 3–4, 101–102].
This means certainly resisting outsiders – defending the irreducibility of Law to a “system of rules” or to an ensemble of “policy choices” or to “a set of institutional arrangements” (resisting both rule-centred formalism and legal scientific instrumentalism, brought together as calculating forms of reason) [40: 103]. This also and decisively means exploring the possibilities of an internal point of view, which experiences narrative not as a “story of facts” but as a “memory of memories” (“in doing law we must be centres of energy, of invention, and of life”) [41: 44, 46 − 7].
“Dans cette opération, le juge ‘traduit’ le discours de l’auteur (parfois distant de plusieurs siècles, comme pour le Code Napoléon) en celui du lecteur contemporain; il traduit la lettre du texte dans le langage de l’esprit qu’il convient de lui prêter au regard de la légitimité et de l’efficacité qu’on est en droit d’attendre d’un texte juridique, il rapproche la partie (telle clause contractuelle, tel article de loi) de l’ensemble (le système juridique envisagé comme un tout).” [29: 32].
A global characterization of this archetypal or aspirational perspective (capable of encompassing diverse developments and specifications and thus also distinct non-positivist conceptions of Law) is eloquently proposed by Nigel Simmonds [34: 51–56]. There are however also relevant positivist conceptions (those which, concerning legal system, assume a rigorously constitutive normativism, and with it, the decisive legacies of Enlightenment’s jus-rationalism and 19th century’s naturhistorische Methode), that can and should also be characterized as “aspirational” ─ with claims or desiderata to be taken into account which, in their purely formal intelligibility, prove to be inseparable from the category norm or from its rational universality and self-subsistence, if not immanent veritas (irreducible to the imperative-command and the conventional rule). This counterpoint involving norm-ratio, imperative-command and conventional rule highlights actually three irreconcilable types of positivism (the first assuming a normativist conception, the second an imperative theory, the third a conventionalist approach). Only the first fits into an aspirational conception of Law.
The excluded perspectives will obviously be all non-positivisms that (from Fuller to Alexy) explore an aspirational or ideal dimension with a formal or procedural character or “nature”, but also obviously the normativist positivism identified in the previous note.
This is certainly one of the main lessons (if not the main lesson) of Castanheira Neves’ (so-called) jurisprudentialism (the reflective horizon in which the research agenda that I outline in this text is explicitly inscribed).
As is known, the signifier Lebensform is used in Philosophische Untersuchungen [42] with extraordinary parsimony (we find it in §§ 19, 23 and 241 of the first part and on pp. 277 and 363 of the second part), a parsimony that contrasts with the controversies raised by the reading-reception of Wittgenstein’s work, in which the intelligibility required by this category is intensely debated, namely to discuss whether it should be closer to an anthropological-cultural matrix or a natural-scientific model (the latter from the perspective of a certain naturalis historia). For an attentive critical reconstruction of this issue (including the controversy that opposes N. Garver and R. Haller) — a reconstruction that defends an exemplary gradualist solution (able to see in the category in question eine primäre, speziesspezifische und eine sekundäre, anthropologisch- soziokulturelle Bedeutung) —, see R. Ferber [6: 270–276]. Without forgetting the development proposed by Marion Colas-Blaise, with a systematic exploration of the five passages of the Philosophische Untersuchungen, but now explicitly confronted with the universe of Greimasian semiotics [4].
“Comment les appeler? C’est la question, un peu byzantine comme toute question d’ordre terminologique, qui nous est posée: faut-il y voir des ‘formes’ ou des ‘styles’ de vie ? Ou, pourquoi pas, des ‘genres’, ou par exemple des ‘modes’ de vie ? — La discussion est ouverte. Mais quelle qu’en soit l’issue, l’essentiel restera pour nous cette confirmation: d’une façon ou d’une autre, il y a place, en sémiotique, pour la vie ! L’obstination de quelques marginaux de notre espèce est sans doute pour quelque chose dans le regain d’intérêt pour cette notion qui, en deçà du textuel et au-delà des disputes terminologiques, reconduit vers l’existentiel. Ce qui revient à dire qu’à nos yeux, c’est la logique du projet sémiotique dans son ensemble qui commandait ce retour.” [12: 2].
The isolation that interests us today when we consider the republican “rise” of the secular “jurists” (the iuris consulti or prudentes, who replaced the pontiffs) —and its “fine sense of the limitations of the law” [35: 22]— in fact corresponds less to the reflexive axis deliberately explored by Schulz — circumscribing grounds or realms under the macroscopic (abstractly conceived) perspective of rules or groups of rules, which are said to be legal and extra-legal (religious, moral and consuetudinary) rules [35: 28] — than to the invention of practical controversy (juridically filtered as a case) and to its methodologically relevant microscopic perspective.
This means freeing judicial rhetoric from the holistic continuum that the Aristotelian emancipation (secularization) of praxis-phronesis constitutively preserved, as well as from its strict reference to the past. The construction of a claim to autonomy seems, in fact, inseparable from this change of emphasis concerning the temporal dimension, not because the reference to the past loses its relevance — without the reconstitution of what really happened there would be no possible answer to the indispensable status coniecturalis and the interrogation “an sit?”—, but rather because this reference henceforth appears organically integrated in the present of the controversy, as a necessary condition of the render-tribuere (ius suum cuique tribuere) which, as a judgement, appeases the parties’ claims [16].
“Unter ihrem Namen wird die Humanitas zum ersten Mal bedacht und erstrebt…” [8: 19].
What is obviously mobilized here is the “perspective”-visée (Sicht) that treats understanding-Verstehen as a fundamental mode (Grundart) of the Being of Dasein [7: 142–148] ([D]as Verstehen macht in seinem Entwurfcharakter existenzial das aus, was wir die Sicht des Daseins nennen) [7: 146], which means attending to the existential structure of this understanding as power-to-be and to-be-possible, which, in its opening, is fulfilled as a project launched into (out into) the world (Sein lichtet sich dem Menschen im ekstatischen Entwurf [und] überdies (…) ist der Entwurf wesenhaft ein geworfener) [8: 25]. “Das Werfende im Entwerfen ist nicht der Mensch, sondern das Sein selbst, das den Menschen in die Ek-sistenz des Da-seins als sein Wesen schickt…“ [8: 25].
For Heidegger, the reinvention of possible meanings of the signifier projecting-prōicere (strengthening the unity that relates them) allows us to take seriously this Zueinander of “being launched” (Geworfensein) and the corresponding “project-projecting” (Entwurf) — and speak thus of a Dasein als geworfener Entwurf. What is actually at stake is the possibility of understanding the indispensable relationship between the facticity of Da-sein müssen and the “ek-sistentiality” of a Da-sein können — it being clear that the unquestioned projection (ungefragten Geworfenheit) associated with the self-subsistent (opaque) treatment of that facticity (als gegebener Seinsbestand) closes us in the object-domain of ontic determination… and that only the perspective-visée of this “ek-sistentiality”, because it overcomes the risk of being limited by an external approach, allows us to “see” (ontologically) through (or from) the openness to the world and the transparency that this openness guarantees or that it is (Die Sicht, die sich primär und im ganzen auf die Existenz bezieht, nennen wir die Durchsichtigkeit), thus managing to “project” or “launch forward the possibility as a possibility” (der Entwurf im Werfen die Möglichkeit als Möglichkeit sich vorwirrt und als solche sein läßt) [7: 145–146].
“Das Entwerfen hat nichts zu tun mit einem Sichverhalten zu einem ausgedachten Plan, gemäß dem das Dasein sein Sein einrichtet, sondern als Dasein hat es sich je schon entworfen und ist, solange es ist, entwerfend” [7: 145].
According to Castanheira Neves, the acknowledgement that law’s autonomous response is not a necessary answer, but only one culturally plausible and civilizationally moulded (and, as such, also continuously renewed) response among other possible responses, corresponds, in fact, to an essential reconstitution of the conditions under which law emerges. Three conditions are explored here: (a) the worldly-social condition, identifying an objective relational (inter-subjective) performative space as an ensemble of (positive and negative) apportionment-relationships; (b) the anthropological-existential condition, considering the incompleteness and openness of the human species and the corresponding invention of a cultural and institutional second nature, which remain components of an irreducible dialectics between subjective autonomy and communitarian integration; (c) the ethical or ethical-juridical condition (the decisive one), acknowledging the invention of a specific kind of intersubjectivity (between relativized, comparable and limited spheres of autonomy and responsibility and the corresponding masks of subjects-persons) and which — whilst justifying an autonomous experience of personhood (based on a constitutive equilibrium between suum and commune, freedom-equality and formally and materially limited responsibility) — is considered a specific “axiological acquisition” (also assuming the methodological priority of controversy). The possibility of suppressing the latter (not necessary) ethical-juridical condition — precisely the one which gives Law its identity as an autonomous order-ordinans of validity — opens up the path to institutionalising an answer to the first two (necessary) conditions which, whilst frustrating specific intentions and specific ways of creating communitarian meaning (obviously those corresponding to the claims of the ethical-juridical condition), should be definitively inscribed in (or rationalized as components of) alternative orders. The most relevant development of the three conditions is proposed in [27].
This means mobilizing in a positive way some of the arguments critically developed by Ricoeur.
For example, the one which Owen Fiss critically-reflexively develops in “The Death of the Law?” whilst denouncing the risks and threats associated with hetero-referential legal theoretical movements such as Law and Economics and Critical Legal Studies and attempting to show how we should offer plausible resistance (considering the specificity of Law). This is only one possible example, chosen less on account of its content than for its expressive title. Nobody ignores however that this same formulation has become recurrently mobilized in our time in relation to the societal challenges justified by the environment of Techno-societies in general and by the explosion of Artificial Intelligence in particular: see exemplarily [5], [32] and [21].
This means that the identity of law as a cultural artefact and the corresponding claim to autonomy should be reconstituted (in our ongoing effort to reconsider Western heritage and its present patrimony), whilst admitting that some major signs or traces recognizable in the initial step — the consecration of dignity of status as comparability and the institutionalization of audiatur et altera pars as a specification of a subjective and objective tertiality — persist as more or less explicitly constitutive features of identity in the subsequent trajectory, albeit permanently recreated and transformed (and as such inscribed-immersed in a productive circle of construction, reproduction and realization).
References
Bronze, Fernando José. 2020. Metodologia do Direito. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra.
Bubner, Rüdiger. 1990. Dialektik als Topik: Bausteine zu einer lebensweltlichen Theorie der Rationalität. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Cesarino, P. Niemeyer. 2012. Tales of the death-path: Ethnography and translation of amerindian poetry. Estudos Avançados 26 (76): 75–108.
Colas-Blaise, Marion. 2012. Forme de vie et formes de vie: vers une sémiotique des cultures. In Nouveaux actes sémiotiques 115 (Les formes de vie à l’épreuve d’une sémiotique des cultures): https://www.unilim.fr/actes-semiotiques/2631 (extracted the 20th January 2013).
Endicott, Timothy / Yeung, Karen. 2002. The death of law? Computationally personalized norms and the rule of Law. University of Toronto Law Journal 72: 373–402.
Ferber, Rafael. 1992. Lebensform oder Lebensformen. Zwei Addenda zur Kontroverse zwischen N. Garver und R. Haller. In Klaus Puhl (ed.) Wittgensteins Philosophie der Mathematik: Akten des 15. Internationalen Wittgenstein-Symposiums, Teil 2, Schriftenreihe der Wittgenstein-Gesellschaft, Band 20/2: 270–276.
Heidegger, Martin. 2001 (1927). Sein und Zeit. 18th edition (reprinting the 15th), Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Heidegger, Martin. 1947. Über den Humanismus. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann.
Jackson, Bernard S. 1985. Semiotics and Legal Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Jackson, Bernard S. 1988. Law, Fact and Narrative Coherence. Liverpool: Deborah Charles.
Jackson, Bernard S. 1995. Making Sense in Law. Liverpool: Deborah Charles.
Landowski, Eric. 2012. Régimes de sens et styles de vie. In Nouveaux actes sémiotiques, 115 (Les formes de vie à l’épreuve d’une sémiotique des cultures): https://www.unilim.fr/actes-semiotiques/2647 (extracted the 20th January 2013).
Linhares, J. M. Aroso. 2012. Law’s Cultural Project and the Claim to Universality or the Equivocalities of a Familiar Debate. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 25 (4): 489–503.
Linhares, J. M. Aroso. 2014. Direito, violência e tradução: poderá o Direito, enquanto forma de vida civilizacionalmente situada, oferecer-nos as condições de tercialidade exigidas pelo problema do diálogo intercultural? In Themis, XV (26/27): 29–59.
Linhares, J. M. Aroso. 2018. From "Brave New World" to “Island”. Huxley’s Tales about the Alternatives to Law? In Kabashima, Liu, Luetge/ Prada García (eds.), The Idea of Justice in Literature, 79–100. Wiesbaden: Springer.
Linhares, J. M. Aroso. 2018. Law and Opera as Practical-cultural Artefacts, or the Productivity and Limits of a Plausible Counterpoint. In Manzin, Puppo, Tomasi (eds.), Multimodal Argumentation, Pluralism and Images in Law (Studies on Argumentation & Legal Philosophy/3), Quaderni della Facoltà di Giurisprudenza, dell’Università degli Studi di Trento 36: 241–266.
Linhares, J. M. Aroso. 2018. The Claim for Consonance between Principles and Problem-solving Practices: The Challenge of Plurality and the Indispensable Mediation of Juristenrecht. In Linhares, Gaudêncio, Godinho (eds.), Jurists’ Law and European Identity. Dogmatic-institutional, methodological and legal-philosophical problems, 107–127. Coimbra: UCILeR’s.
Linhares, J. M. Aroso. 2020. Exemplarity as Concreteness, or the Challenge of Institutionalising a Productive Circle between Past and Present, Old and New. In Angela Condello (ed.), New Rhetorics for Contemporary Legal Discourse, 83–100. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University.
Linhares, J. M., and Aroso. 2022. Is Dignity a Non-contingent Autonomously Juridical Idea? A Conversation Piece with Jeremy Waldron. In J. M. Aroso Linhares, Manuel Atienza (eds.), Human Dignity and the Autonomy of Law, 259–275. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Linhares, J. M. Aroso. 2023. Legal Philosophy and the Promise(s) of Legal Semiotics. In Wagner, Marusek (eds.), Research Handbook on Legal Semiotics, 47–60. Cheltenham/ Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Lucy, William. 2022. The Death of Law. Another Obituary. Cambridge Law Journal 81: 109–138.
MacIntyre, Alisdair. 1988. Whose justice? Which rationality? London: Duckworth.
MacIntyre, Alisdair. 2009. God, Philosophy, Universities. A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Neves, A. Castanheira. 1993. Metodologia Jurídica. Problemas Fundamentais. Coimbra: Coimbra Editora.
Neves, A. Castanheira. 1995. O direito como alternativa humana. Notas de reflexão sobre o problema actual do direito. In Neves (ed.), Digesta – Escritos Acerca do direito, do pensamento jurídico, da sua metodologia e outros, vol. I, 287–310. Coimbra: Coimbra Editora.
Neves, A. Castanheira. 2003. O actual problema metodológico da interpretação juridica. I. Coimbra: Coimbra Editora.
Neves, A. Castanheira. 2008. Coordenadas de uma reflexão sobre o problema universal do direito — ou as condições da emergência do direito como direito. In Neves (ed.), Digesta – Escritos Acerca do direito, do pensamento jurídico, da sua metodologia e outros, vol. III, 9–41. Coimbra: Coimbra Editora.
Ost, François. 2007. Dire le droit, faire justice. Bruxelles: Bruylant.
Ost François. 2009. Le Droit comme traduction. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval.
Ost, François. 2021. Le Droit ou L’empire du tiers. Paris: Dalloz.
Ricca, Mario. 2023. Intercultural Spaces of Law. Translating Invisibilities. Cham: Springer International.
Ricciardi, Mario. 2022. Chronicle of a Death Foretold. First Thoughts on “The Death of Law”/ Cronaca di Una morte annunciata. Prime riflessioni su “The Death of Law”. Notizie Di Politeia 38(148): 3–10.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Temps et récit, vol. II. Paris: Éditons du Seuil.
Simmonds, Nigel. 2007. Law as a Moral Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schulz, Fritz. 1936. The Principles of Roman Law (revised and enlarged translation from Prinzipien der römischen Rechts, 1934). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Inwardness and the Culture of Modernity. In Honneth, et al. (eds.), Zwischenbetractungen Im Prozess Der Aufklärung. Jürgen Habermas zum 60. Geburtstag, 601–623. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Waldron, Jeremy. 2015. Dignity, Rank, & Rights. Edited and introduced by Meir Dan-Cohen. Oxford: Oxford University Press (paperback).
White, James Boyd. 1985. Heracles’ Bow. Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law. Madison: the University of Wisconsin.
White, James Boyd. 1990. Justice as Translation. An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism. Chicago/London: the University of Chicago.
White, James Boyd. 1999. From expectation to experience. Essays on Law and Legal Imagination. Michigan: the University of Michigan, Michigan.
White, James Boyd. 2021. Keep Law Alive. In Undecidabilities and Law. The Coimbra Journal for Legal studies. Vol. I: Law and the Janus-faced Morality of Poltical Correctness 1: 29–48.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1971 (1937–1949). Philosophische Untersuchungen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Funding
This essay was written as an activity of UCILeR (The University of Coimbra Institute for Legal Research) ─ in the context of a mission out (concerning the 23rd International Roundtables for the Semiotics of Law/ IRSL Roma 2023) ─ and within the framework of the Project I&D UIDB/04643/2020 (“Societal Challenges, Uncertainty and Law: Plurality | Vulnerability | Undecidability”), financed by the Portuguese FCT- Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia.
Open access funding provided by FCT|FCCN (b-on).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Linhares, J.M.A. Translation, Intercultural Dialogue and the Mediation of Legal Semiotics. Int J Semiot Law (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-024-10191-7
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-024-10191-7