Law as a culturally constituted sign-system – A space for interpretation

Authors:

• Anne Wagner,
• Aleksandra Ewelina Matulewska,
• Cheng Le

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to discuss legal language systems as culturallyconstituted sign-systems that are continuously evolving in time and space. Tounderstand messages formulated in legal languages, one needs to realize that lawis culture-bound, which in turn means that law reflects society’s mentality,tolerance, knowledge, social perceptions, etc. At the same time, law is a livingreality impacted by various global phenomena and other legal systems. Therefore,this legal reality has“divergent potentialities”(Hasegawa, Ko. 2016.“A glance atthe dynamics of‘confluence’in a legal system–notes on H. Patrick Glenn’sinsights concerningLegal Traditions of the World”.InTransnational Legal Theory.Vol. 7/1: 1–8, 3), which enable it to develop in various directions depending onwider social, political and technological contexts. Additionally, when communi-cating law interlingually and intralingually, one needs to take into account theknowledge of senders and recipients since the degree of commensurability of lawdepends on the uniformity of interpretation on meanings. When discussing theissues of sign meaning interpretation, the authors will focus on non-decomposableunits and fuzzy units. The meaning of such terms is subject to interpretationthrough the prism of tacit knowledge. Therefore, the interpretation of anyculturally constituted sign-system is burdened with some loss of information andmeaning deficiency.