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The Promise of Legal Semiotics

With a single rhetorical stroke, Professor Jeremy Paul has both identified and constituted a school of legal semiotics.1 In reading his description one notes that, like other schools of legal thought, the school of legal semiotics has distinguished precursors (Wesley Hohfeld, Felix Cohen),2 and, like the Legal Process School in particular, it even comes equipped with a fundamental text which is as yet unpublished.3 If there is now a school of legal semiotics, one might well ask what its political implications are. Professor Paul identifies me with three different positions on this subject. First, he ascribes to me the position that regardless of its political uses, "semiotic study is valuable for its own sake because it teaches us more about our legal culture."4 Second, extrapolating from my work on deconstructive theory, he suggests I hold that, like deconstruction, semiotics has no necessary politics, but only the politics of those who make use of it.5 Third, he concludes from this that my position is that "there is little or no connection between semiotics and progressivism. ' ' 6 I agree with the first and second statements Professor Paul attributes to me, but not the third. There is a connection between semiotics and progressive politics, but the connection is a historically contingent one. Understanding why this is so, I argue, requires its own exercise of semiotic theory. In this Essay, then, I propose to apply legal semiotics to itself. I hope that this task will reveal something about the value of the semiotic enterprise, and the future promise of legal semiotics.