Signs, and Signs in Law

Abstract

Important focus on signs in law are the result of (a) the concept of a sign itself, (b) the importance of culture in this context, (c) signs as a power of merging law and semiotics, and (d) the community as a precondition for signs.Law refers to Peirce’s definition of a sign and should therefore accept its triple relationship as constitutive: the “interpretant” is mediator in understanding signs. A sign on itself is not a sign: there is always a context, a community, a language or at least another person needed to cause a sign to be a sign! Yet, we all (lawyers included) talk about signs as if they were things. The “as if” is law’s fundamental figure called ‘fiction’.Peirce underlines how every thought contains the idea of a triadic relation: “a sign is a thing related to an object and determining in the interpreter an interpreting sign of the same object” he writes, and involves the relation between sign, interpreting sign, and object. The latter are social issues and therefore essential for law—as essential as they were for medicine in Ancient Greek thought formation pertaining to medicine. The “Cf.” as a sign in law is an example here.