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International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

PIERCE AND LEGAL SEMIOTICS

Jan M. Broekman

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

• Peirce Elucidates Legal Language


• Peirce's Philosophical Texts


• From Philosophy to Semiotics to Lawyers


• Reading Peirce


• Why Lawyers Should Read Peirce

References

Abstract Peirce is not a lawyer or a legal philosopher. A globally increasing interest for his work delivers, however, a new foundation for a lawyer's need to understand her position and function. A more precise knowledge of the implicit semiotic, sign-related dimensions of a legal practice belongs to the many answers to the question why lawyers should read Peirce. Theory and practice of law will be seen in another light than ever before!

Keywords Language, Pragmatism, Logic, semiosis, sign, discourse, reference, discourse.

Introduction

The magic of law has a name—the name is 'language'. Its magicians have studied to handle it carefully and to exploit all possibilities. Court decisions do not only decide cases, but they also give them names, and those names symbolize a meaning. Names, not case materials are quoted in arguments and recited in legal-political debates. The names name the legal materials; candidates for official functions are asked to express an opinion about Roe v Wade—their answers consider the name as a symbol. The symbol is rather a political issue than an index for the precise legal content of that well-known case. Doctrines are symbols: a breach of contract is a sign in legal language and the meaning of that sign determines a rich variety of legal consequences.

1. Peirce Elucidates Legal Language

This fascinating view on law and legal discourse is by no means common knowledge. Lawyers consider language as their precious instrument but mingle signs and words, fuse doctrine and expressiveness, mix names and symbols. They have a mastery of their language, but one could ask whether having such mastery is something that effects life whilst you are uttering the sentence? They seldom know an answer. In other words: is the utterance of a Court decision the happening of the decision's material subject, so that one could say that the decision is precisely the technique of using command words? Jurists generally hold it that expressions describe or represent reality, which is not a legal but a philosophical perspective.

Apparently, only an outsider can inform lawyers about the multiple implications of their own words! That is the task of legal semioticians, and one of their founding fathers is the US philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce. Names, doctrines and other legal expressions are in his view a sign, the latter being a core concept of each process of meaning formation. A sign is for Peirce a something that relates to something else for someone in some respect or capacity. This is general and precise at the same time and could help, among many others, jurists to clarify their magic in social life. Daniel Chandler formulates in his 2002 introduction Semiotics: The Basics:

Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign.1 It ‘involves the study not only of what we refer to as ‘signs’ in every day speech, but of anything which ‘stands for something else’. Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, gestures and objects.’ Signs can be something active and positive, or something negative, so that an absence of an action may also be seen as a sign. Semiotics is also the ‘study of how meanings are made and how reality is represented.’ Making of meaning and representation can take place in the form of ‘texts’ and ‘media’. Legal and legislative texts provide one category of text….a ‘text can exist in any medium and may be verbal, non-verbal, or both (…). The term ‘text’ usually refers to a message, which has been recorded in some way (e.g. writing, audio- and video- recording) so that it is physically independent of its sender or receiver. A text is an assemblage of signs (such as words, images, sounds, and/or gestures) constructed (and interpreted) with reference to the conventions associated with a genre and a particular medium of communication.

1 Chandler, Daniel: Semiotics: The Basics, Routledge, Abingdon (2002), p.2 See also Colin Robertson: Semiotics and EULaw, Mss. 2008, Ch. 2: EU legislative texts as signs.

One should emphasize that such descriptions are either literal quotations or paraphrases of lines Peirce wrote. The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics2 informs about sign and semiotics in the same spirit of Peirce:

2 Merrell, Floyd: Charles Sanders Peirce's Concept of the Sign, in: The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics, P. Coblry [Ed.], London/New York 2001, p. 28 ff.

Signs can be seen as comprising three components: 'representamen', which is ‘what usually goes for a sign in everyday talk'; an 'object' to which the representamen is related, and an 'interpretant' (meaning) reflecting the link between the first two. Peirce classified signs into various types: 'icon', 'index' and 'symbol'. The icon interrelates with its semiotic object by virtue of some resemblance or similarity with it. An index interrelates with its semiotic object through some actual or physical or imagined causal connection and a symbol is a linguistic sign whose interrelation with its semiotic object is conventional. So there is no necessary natural link (as with the index) or a link due to some resemblance or similarity (as with the icon) between the representamen and the semiotic object.

Peirce acclaims not unlike De Saussure that signs, strung together according to rules, communicate meaning. Coded texts are thus signs to decode for a reader, and that decoding touches the essence of the magic of legal language.

Roberta Kevelson, who strived her entire life to bring semiotics and law together, focused in the first place on Peircean insights and their texts3 . She gave law a Peircean frame when highlighting in various publications how the entire notion of a legal system, consisting of interrelating communicative processes between legal discourse and legal practice, functions almost universally as a model of dialogic thought development…law is a prototype of intersubjective social change of value as a whole…in view of Peirce's 'expanded logic' …it is nothing new to regard logical terms and modes or patterns of reasoning as signs and sign systems. Aristotle speaks of signs in this sense. The legal argument is not a formal argument. Its hypotheses are neither true nor false, but hypothetical. Therefore it was believed for a long time that analysis of legal discourse must necessary much looser and less conclusive that discourse proceeding from true propositions. Yet it was Peirce's genius to recognize that at bottom all propositions are hypothetical…

3 Kevelson, Roberta: The Law as a System of Signs, Plenum Press New York1988.

Fisch, the initiating and original commentator to Peirce, highlighted connections between Peirce and American legal pragmatism, in particular represented by jurists like Holmes, who in dealing with various forms of life and law proved to possess notions of semiotic relevance when writing on liability, tort, contract, possession and the like4 . But that is certainly not enough to describe any strong, direct, non-philosophical and jurisprudentially relevant thought pattern of Peirce on legal semiotics. In his philosophy, as is the case with many authors of articles in the IJLS5 , the semiotic background remains general and one even does not know whether semiotics can be applied to law, or want to implement other types of relationship with everyday practices of law.

4 Max H. Fisch: Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism (Ketner & Kloesel, Eds) Bloomington Indiana UP 1986, Ch.2 ; V. Colapietro: Peircean Semeiotics and Legal Practices, in: International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, Vol 21, No.3, 2008, p.223ff.

5 See for example how the entire third issue of the IJSl 2008 remains in a dualism between semiotics and law, and leaves the relationship between the two undecided.

6 The Peirce edition volumes I – VI of Charles Hartshorne & Paul Weiss was published between 1931 and 1935, and the Arthur W. Burks edited volumes VII & VIII followed 1958. There was, and still is, however, no undisputed and entirely complete text edition.

7 Deely, John: Membra Ficte Disjecta (A Disordered Array of Severed Limbs) Editorial Introduction to the Electronic Edition of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 1994

2. Peirce's Philosophical Texts

This situation results neither from lawyers' disinterest nor from weaknesses in philosophical insight. The unfolding influence of the Peircean corpus of philosophical texts (he did not write legal texts) is important, and the electronic edition of the Collected Papers will facilitate the spreading of his ideas. There are, however, debates about the quality and implications of that edition, which will undoubtedly lead to newly corrected editions and progressing clarifications6. In his Foreword to the Electronic Edition, John Deely mentions a number of reasons to have a critical mind awakened when reading these texts. They pertain to the ordering of fragments, the dispersion and misrepresentation of themes, the biased interpretation of thematic connections in disordered text fragments. The title of his Introduction is: "Membra Ficta Disjecta (A Disordered Array of Severed Limbs)", which goes mainly to the editing of texts. The essence of Peirce's work, Deeley remarks7 ,

is a question at bottom of the principal optic through which Peirce early and ever-after came to view the problems of philosophy, the optic of "semiotic", as he called it after Locke, or the doctrina signorum, as both Locke and Peirce called it. …through the Peirce Edition Project at IUPUI, Fisch had shown the new generation not only the importance of the unpublished Peirce manuscripts, but, equally importantly, how to read them with semiotic eyes… those of us alive today and interested in Peirce would like to have access to as much of his work as possible as soon as possible. At present, as far as published writings go, that still means the CP [short for "Collected Papers"].

The story of the Harvard edition titled CP, … is a story fairly well known, and a sad one. Hartshorne and Weiss, along with Burks later, deserve our thanks for getting the volumes out, but we must at the same time regret the manner of their editing, which was to construct a topical scheme of their own devising under which to sort and dissect the papers left whole to Harvard through the good intentions of Josiah Royce. How Harvard abused that trust! The story, at least, is now out with the bursting upon the scene of the newly worked (after more than thirty years of repression) biographical dissertation of Joseph Brent in the form of the book, Charles Sanders Peirce. A Life. (Bloomington. Indiana UP, 1993). This publication is a tribute in equal parts to the writing skill and historical tenacity of its author, to the editorial genius (to say nothing of the detective skills) of Thomas A. Sebeok, and to the publishing genius of John Gallman, the Director of the Indiana University Press. … Using the electronic CP, a reader can reconstruct this whole and print it out as such for scholarly or classroom use. Thus the "bodily parts" of the Peircean corpus, so far as they are included in the CP, may be easily rearrayed in proper order so as to appear in something closer to the light under which Peirce left them.

The explanations of Deely provoke at least three messages of general scope:

(a) Interest in the work of Peirce is growing on a worldwide scale. Peirce will be acknowledged as one of the major American philosophers of the 19th and 20th century, not only in the US but globally. He was recognized as logician, as the philosopher who coined the concept of pragmatism and who developed a phenomenology based on a philosophy of the sign. All these themes are included in his philosophical work.

(b) Peircean semiotics is encapsulated in philosophy. Legal scholars, who exposed the relations between law and semiotics after the fashion of the Critical Legal Studies Movement in the US or structuralism and structural linguistics in Europe just studied Peirce in order to relate some of his insights to legal work—like they did with Kant, Hegel or Derrida. There does not exist a central essay or encompassing Peirce text on semiotics. Lawyers who are fascinated by the opportunities semiotics can deliver must read series of non-legal texts of a mainly logical and philosophical character. The problems with text editing, as indicated before, belong to the history of philosophical texts and do never directly relate to jurisprudence.

(c) Peircean work on semiotics is not explicitly designed for law and legal theory. Legal semioticians try to bridge the gap between the two, and need therefore the accompaniment of legal practitioners. It seems that lawyers read and study Peirce on a personal initiative and do not pursue aims dictated by the requirements of legal practice. The problem of applicability of semiotics in law and legal discourse remains an issue that is absent from Peirce's works, although it fascinates lawyers and philosophers alike and is a touchstone for legal semiotics.

3. From Philosophy to Semiotics to Lawyers

The unfolding of semiotics in Peirce's thoughts is in the first place a matter of philosophy. One of its pillars is the dialogue, the fundamentally inter-subjective character of his thoughts—at certain points a flagrant contrast to Western law, because the latter is in practical attitude and theory deeply individualistic. This found its expression in the style of his philosophical considerations, which in contrast to the analytical and henceforth predominantly monologue character of many contemporary philosophers, invite the reader to think and have a virtual conversation with its author. The texts written in daily reflections upon events of everyday life are an environment in which the reader lives, thinks and concludes with Peirce as her guide. Signs are culminating in the stream of textual utterances and considerations—they are peaks of quotidian events. This is precisely food for lawyers, since it is their profession to qualify outstanding events and their meaning in terms of law and legal discourse. Peirce considers:

Two things here are all-important to assure oneself of and to remember. The first is that a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is "saying to himself," that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. The second thing to remember is that the man's circle of society (however widely or narrowly this phrase may be understood), is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than the person of an individual organism. It is these two things alone that render it possible for you … to distinguish between absolute truth and what you do not doubt8 .

8 Peirce; Collected Papers, Vol. 5.Pragmatism p 421.

There is an important issue involved in these lines. It pertains to one of the major considerations that characterize Peirce's pragmatism. That pragmatism—this is new in philosophy of the final years of the 19th century—is the exclusive method to develop a theory of signs called semiotics, which is in the eyes of Roberta Kevelson for instance a viable means of diagnosing and hence for solving international conflicts9 . His pragmatist maxim formulates:

9 Roberta Kevelson: Crisis in International Law: Signs and Symptoms in: Peirce, Science, Signs. Lang, Paris/New York 1996, p. 147

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.

An important role is fulfilled in this broadening of conception, which extends from the spoken word by an individual to the textual environment in which words and discourses unfold and speakers participate rather than take a subject-bound initiative. Essential is here, how Peirce re-interprets our thoughts, saying

There is no reason why "thought," … should be taken in that narrow sense in which silence and darkness are favorable to thought. It should rather be understood as covering all rational life, so that an experiment shall be an operation of thought. Of course, that ultimate state of habit to which the action of self-control ultimately tends, where no room is left for further self-control, is, in the case of thought, the state of fixed belief, or perfect knowledge10.

10 Peirce; Collected Papers, Vol. 5. p 438, 420.

Peirce changed the classical analytical problem of how thought and action relate (H. von Wright, H. Castaneda). He states that all thoughts are actions, not solely a matter of consciousness or of a state of mind but a disposition to action, which would be unthinkable without intersubjectivity and the support of a community. This is the point where Karl Otto Apel unfolds his sympathy for Peirce and his theory of the a priori character of a community, which always pursues acts of interpreting language, reality, human relations, social order semiotically. He refers to this community in a Peircean spirit as "a supra-individual unity of interpretation on the basis of experimental experience in the long run"11 . Peirce suggests:

11 K.-O.Apel: Transformation der Philosophie, Band II: Das Apriori der Kommunikationsgemeinschaft. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1973

…The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of 'me' and 'you'. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge 12

12 Peirce; Collected Papers, Vol. 5.p. 311.

Community is essential because it demonstrates semiotic relevance through its unity of interpretation and experience. Who speaks about Words, speaks about 'Together': the word 'community' points on the one hand to semiotics because of its social practice to engender consistency in interpretation of signs and meanings, and on the other to logic because of the structure of its experiences. In so far as legal awareness depends on language and the understanding of one self, Peirce has really something to say to lawyers!

As a consequence, Roberta Kevelson dedicated most of her life to make lawyers understand the importance of semiotics for their specific vocation. We want to highlight four themes of Peircean philosophy which are related to this goal:

(a) The philosophy of a sign has to be transformed into a full theory of semiosis, which implies the unfolding of semiotics.

(b) The distinction between formal logic and the logic of discourse (in particular legal discourse) must be re-engineered and its rigidity put into perspective. Peirce confronted traditional logic with the logic of inference, abduction and with pragmatism.

(c) The further differentiation of what Peirce called "pragmatism" or later "pragmaticism" challenges legal pragmatism as understood by American lawyers in particular. The latter focus on the question how to achieve the best results in cases and other legal issues. They consider a discussion about the path to that goal and its inherent principles, strategies, values and norms as pragmatism, which is often a fierce instrumentalism also called legal realism. Llewellyn remarks: "Realism is not a philosophy, but a technology"13 . Peirce focuses not that technology but the foundations of such a discussion and shows how the lawyers' move is not a matter of psychology but of genuine philosophy. His pragmatic/pragmaticistic maxim suggests that the meaning of a concept or sign is rooted in the habits it would establish in a mind that rightly and correctly interprets it. That semiotic conception of a lawyer's mind is of vital importance for legal discourse.

13 K. Llewellyn: The Common Law Tradition. Boston 1960, p. 510.

(d) The triad of "firstness", "secondness" and "thirdness"—unhappy expressions for a deeply philosophical issue—characterizes Peirce's system of ideas, which shows a clear distance to psychology. Peirce offers a new set of concepts to replace the traditional Kantian categories, and in doing so he systematizes reality anew. Those stages are different but coherent attitudes of the mind, and the lawyer would profit from them with a simple exercise to find out in which attitude he finds himself when issuing a judgment, exploring or investigating a legally relevant reality, writing a brief or interpreting statutes. The allocation in especially the second and third attitude highlights the semiotic dimension of his real, virtual or future activity. "They are the being of actual fact, and the being of law that will govern facts in the future" 14. It seems a lawyer's business to constantly change from the one to the other—but is she aware of that modification and its qualities? "…the mind is a sign developing according to the laws of inference", (Peirce) which is an insight of pragmatic nature inherent to the "law-job" Llewellyn would say in his 1941 My Philosophy of Law.

14 Peirce; Collected Papers, Vol. 1.p. 27.

4. Reading Peirce

To read Peirce is not an incidental occurrence. Reading his texts (despite all discussions, doubts and polemics pertaining to editorial questions) means choosing a guide. How often and how intensely does one discuss with his guide about meaning and sense of the project at hand? A good question for a busy lawyer who has to pay attention to more than one case at the time and is involved in thorny matters of interpretation—in the middle of the road, such disputes seem dangerous. The answer is clear: a reflection on their practices is for lawyers already a difficult theoretical job to perform, which has virtually nothing to do with law-philosophical questions about the legal system, its norms, values or social impact. Yet, there are three remarks to place here.

The first is that Peirce texts are read as open-minded conversations, so that it is as if one does not need any knowledge of philosophical theories and viewpoints at all. A conversation with one's guide is not a matter of polemics: the lawyer will become informed—in particular about how to approach reality and its semiotic dimensions—so that the conversation has always great legal relevance. Are not lawyers constantly busy to approach reality? Well then, Peirce shows deep layers of a lawman's subject of interest.

The second is that one can learn from Peirce's examples. The most outstanding example, or metaphor, he uses is exactly the hand of the sheriff. Pencak's rich and sensitive essay on Peirce in his Pennsylvania estate called "Arisbe" describes Peirce's proximity to the law because of his enduring financial difficulties15. In a letter to Lady Welby, May 7, 1904, Peirce writes:

15 W.A.Pencak: Peirce and Arisbe in: History, Signing In. P.Lang, New York/Paris 1993, p.17ff.

A court may issue injunctions and judgments against me and I not care a snap of my finger for them. I may think them idle vapor. But when I feel the sheriff's hand on my shoulder, I shall begin to have a sense of actuality. Actuality is something brute.

The law of gravitation is the judge upon the bench who may pronounce the law till doomsday, but unless the strong-arm of the law, the brutal sheriff, gives effect to the law, it amounts to nothing.

One cannot dismiss the gesture of the sheriff as incidental or inadequate but the sheriff's gesture makes meaning for me: I am a bearer of rights and duties! The rupture in decent human relations, realized in the brute gesture of the sheriff's hand, makes me into an actual and acute legal subject. This meaning is new and this meaning is legal: the sheriff is a meaning maker, not unlike our lawyers today. Change is the keyword here: shock and struggle, constraint and compulsion are its constitutive elements.

The third is in the process character of semiosis. Signs are by no means fixated forever; they are temporary meanings in contextual situations, fluid and multi-interpretable—especially in law! Legal practitioners should acknowledge how their job establishes webs of (legal) meaning through the creation and maintenance of references. It contains the description of a rhetoric task to fulfill. Rhetoric, in a universal sense, is according to Peirce the study of general conditions under which a problem presents itself for solution, and then under which one question leads to another. The latter remark articulates the process character in its entirety. Here is one of the invitational features of Peircean texts: the jurist will immediately experience the relevance for her own performances and conclude for herself that there is never an end to the process of meaning making, and never a moment of meaning fixation for good and forever—even not in the judgments of any Supreme Court!

5. Why Lawyers Should Read Peirce

Our insights in the textual character of Peirce's work and their relation to the performances of lawyers contain an answer to the question why lawyers should read Peirce. A few suggestions could be of interest.

Accessible Texts

As was said before, reading Peirce is fit for lawyers whom he invites to rethink her own metaphors, her everyday-life examples and all conclusions that also support the prevailing steps of a legal profession. These seem encapsulated in the logic of discourse, in the techniques of pursuit of legal meaning, the growing awareness of the importance of language or the many forms of linguistic communication. One does not need to read long strains of texts or to follow complex reasoning with abstract conclusions, which can hardly be communicated with other professionals. Peirce as a philosopher is an exception in that regard. He is a master of short formulations as if he embraces the attitude of Wittgenstein in sentences like: "The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness" or "obeying a rule is a practice", or "is what we call 'obeying a rule' something that it would be possible for only one man to do, and to do only once in his life?16" Peircean thoughts in Wittgensteinean phrases, or vice versa—one considers who would object to read and contemplate them in the daily practices of law and life?

16 L. Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell Oxford 1958 Nrs 255, 202, 199.

Fame of Philosophy

Peirce's philosophy is on its way to become one of the most famous of American philosophy tout court. His work unfolds its importance for all who came to put analytical philosophy in perspective, for all who read Derrida and were fascinated by the vogue of deconstructionism, for all who were seduced by positivism in law and the sciences, for all who had difficulties to choose between principles, rules or original constitutions. Peirce's philosophy has a bright future. We recapitulate some of the peaks of his work.

The World as Sign

Think of his post-Kantian categorization of reality, so that one learns to better understand how to change from one level of our orientation to another, and how to make a sound distinction between habits, rules, viewpoints, ideologies, beliefs, fixations and the like—all manifestations of the human mind at home in different regions of reality. This is a reason for lawyers to keep differences between firstness and thirdness in mind and to appreciate secondness as a mediation level— as if Peirce gave us a new compass to learn to know where we are! The categories first, second and third inspire practitioners and theoreticians of law as expressing (1) chance, (2) reaction, and (3) regularity or habit-formation. Important is also his differentiation of the various types of logic that guide us even where we do not precisely follow with scientific precision. Peirce's fascination by the logic of discourse towers above opinion battles among lawyers such as rule following, principle ridding, rule abiding, textual interpreting, literal meaning or narration adhering of lawyers. His philosophical fame is beyond most of our –isms, especially in as far as the founding of semiotics is concerned, which is a fact that can be an inspiration for lawyers and support their meaning making role in a globalizing society. One should not forget, that Peirce's theory of signs forms the basis for a metaphysically relevant description of a universe in process. Everything that exists can be seen as a cosmic semiosis, an evolutionary process that embraces all humans alike "…the entire universe", Peirce writes, "not merely the universe of existents, but all that wider universe, embracing the universe of existents as a part, the universe which we are all accustomed to refer to as "the truth" -- that all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs."17 As a consequence, signs do not form a single factor of the semiotic approach, they are only functioning in a context of understanding the world in a pragmatist sense, that is as an ensemble of signs entering in and belonging to the flow of human activity. Signs join signs and their patterns form a universe that one can interpret like Aristotle already did: as The Universe.

17 Peirce; Collected Papers, Vol. 5.p. 448, note 1.

"The universe" Peirce writes, "is a vast representamen, a great symbol of God's purpose, working out its conclusions in living realities. … In the little bit that you or I can make out of this huge demonstration, our perceptual judgments are the premises for us. The Universe as an argument is necessarily a great work of art, a great poem -- for every fine argument is a poem and a symphony -- just as every true poem is a sound argument. But let us compare it rather with a painting -- with an impressionist seashore piece -- then every Quality in a Premise is one of the elementary colored particles of the Painting; they are all meant to go together to make up the intended Quality that belongs to the whole as whole. That total effect is beyond our ken; but we can appreciate in some measure the resultant Quality of parts of the whole -- which Qualities result from the combinations of elementary Qualities that belong to the premises"18

18 Peirce; Collected Papers, Vol. 5.p. 119.

A Lawyer's Interest

Let us summarize the substantial arguments for a lawyer that may convince him to read Peirce, if his time budget allows or the structure of his meaning making forces her to do.

(1) There is no direct mention of law, legal theory or legal practice in Peirce's oeuvre. As a lawyer, one should not attempt to organize a search for fragments or formulations that are immediately directive or otherwise relevant for law and legal practice. Who studies Peircean texts is confronted with philosophical ideas, analyses and often bewildering conclusions from observations of everyday life. This gives the lawyer as it were a passport for interpretations that may highlight her own legal view on reality—never direct but always in balanced prose, rich in symbols of life in a semiotic process.

(2) Any quotation from the works of Peirce in legal context is, despite the difficulties of editorial nature, a reliable quote. It will never be a quote simply because one sympathizes with a certain literary fashion, as was often the case with jurists citing for example Derrida and other deconstructionists in their legal theoretical considerations, briefs or decisions. Peirce's work receives increasingly global respect and in particular interdisciplinary power of persuasion. An interdisciplinary approach is important for the entire legal profession. It is worthwhile to underline that the semiotic dimension of the Peircean texts makes his philosophy accessible to scientists and lawyers alike. Law will be more and more confronted with binary thought patterns, sign systems and semiotic processes, which are already dominating the world of e-communication and e-sciences together with the conceptualization of virtual reality.

(3) The idea to understand legal discourse as dominated by signs is extremely fruitful for legal sciences, jurisprudence and the practice of law. It leads to an understanding of one's own sign interpretations, names (for instance of cases) becoming signs, references which signs necessarily unfold and other issues that Peirce offers for maintaining a logic of discourse. It furthermore clarifies how a lawyer's own activity is embedded in those uses of signs, symbols and reference patterns as well as other linguistic elements. Law and legal discourse are understandable and interpretable as a language on the basis of Peircean intuitions, so that a renewed self-understanding can result from reading his texts.

(4) There is not only a challenge to apply semiotic knowledge or to recognize the logic of (legal) discourse for the entire legal profession. The lawyer should not solely think about applications, but begin to understand how she is by definition in a privileged position in the process of semiosis. Lawyers are totally involved in the activity to conduct, understand, participate and create involvements in specific modifications of signs and meanings. This newly conceived view on reality and the jurist's own position enables him to adept a great variety of attitudes and signifying complexities within hitherto undiscovered horizons.

(5) Jurists reading Peirce transcend today's battle of opinions and philosophies in legal philosophy and legal theory as well as global jurisprudence. They do not need anymore to position themselves in legal positivism, legal realism, instrumentalism, natural law, interactionism, institution theory, systems theory, autopoiesis or legal pragmatism. Peirce's pragmatism does not initiate a new fashion in jurisprudence, but strives for a realistic and semiotically well-grounded view on reality as expressed in laws, statutes, decisions and other legal activities. It truly concerns "the lawman's job" and creates respectable distance to traditional syllogistic thinking in legal decision-making (A is, and B is, so C must be…) and Peirce's philosophy is by no means a subject-centered and individualistic project. It could stimulate a lawyer to embrace a dialogue attitude and to reconsider the position of self and other in discourse. That contains a plea to valuate affects rather than effects when the legal job has to be performed—a truly new chapter opens when lawyers read Peirce!

References

Apel Karl-Otto: Transformation der Philosophie, Band II: Das Apriori der Kommunikationsgemeinschaft. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1973

Burks, Arthur W.: Collected Papers Charles Sanders Pierce, Ed. Vol. VII & VIII 1958.

Chandler, Daniel: Semiotics: The Basics, Routledge, Abingdon 2002.

Colapietro, Vincent: Peircean Semeiotics and Legal Practices, in: International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, Vol 21, No.3, 2008.

Deely, John: Membra Ficte Disjecta (A Disordered Array of Severed Limbs) Editorial Introduction to the Electronic Edition of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 1994

Fisch Max H.: Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism Ketner & Kloesel, Eds Bloomington, Indiana UP 1986.

Floyd, Merrell: Charles Sanders Peirce's Concept of the Sign, in: The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics, P. Cobley (Ed.) London/New York 2001.

Hartshorne, Charles & Weiss Paul, Eds: Collected Papers Charles Sanders Pierce, Vols I – VII, 1931—1935.

Kevelson, Roberta: Crisis in International Law: Signs and Symptoms in: Peirce, Science, Signs. Lang, Paris/New York 1996.

Kevelson, Roberta: The Law as a System of Signs, 1988 Plenum Press New York.

Llewellyn Karl: The Common Law Tradition. Boston 1960.

Pencak, William A.: Peirce and Arisbe in: History, Signing In. Peter Lang, New York/Paris 1993. P. 17 ff.

Peirce, Ch. S. Collected Papers, Electronic Ed. Vols I-VI, VII & VIII.

Robertson, Colin: Semiotics and EULaw, Ch. 2: EU legislative texts as signs. Mss. 2008.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell Oxford 1958.

Jan M. Broekman PhD.

Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law

Penn State University

>jmb56@dsl.psu.edu<

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