Jurisfiction

Abstract

The meanings of what we understand as law are the product of communication, togetherness, or social activity in whatever type of language—but in all types of coherence: a narration. From traditional legal hermeneutics to contemporary legal semiotics is law regarded and disregarded as embraced by discourse. With and within that discourse, narrations play the dominant role. They form a specific unity in a culture, so that partial discourses in law can form together a master discourse or narrative. This Brief’s basic view is that the latter are the result of continuous and intertwining conversion processes. Elements of law’s language, like ‘form’ or ‘fact’, are in essence the product of narrative contexts. That puts their ‘fictional’ character in perspective and determines their values, truth functions and related social qualifications. The narrative scope of law includes various types of language, in particular the analog and digital in modern language.