Abstract
A post-structuralist, semiotic theory of legal interpretation shows that it explains how statutes, constitutions, and judicial opinions get their meanings. This theory is applied to texts of international law, illustrated with outlines of the 1988 U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The theory rejects a legal positivism, and also rejects linguistic structuralism with which Saussure’s descendants stirred so much excitement in past years. Semiotics tends to be static, mechanical systems-based, and claims to universal structures of the human mind which either do not exist at all, or are so deep and minimal that they have only feeble influence on the cultural superstructure. Structural legal semiotics becomes merely a neo-positivist exercise of analyzing law as an autonomous system of coded norms, a pragmatic account of legal interpretation, which starts with the notion that language and legal meaning are cultural artifacts produced in time and space through specific social institutions.
The Treaty debate, the politics, reality and danger of the event, quickly became a dry technical exchange between lawyers about the meaning of a document. If in fact law does not prevent violence except when it coincides with the interests of the powerful, then those who cherish peaceful resolution of disputes must see how important it is to restructure both law and power. By acknowledging that law is something we are constantly making together out of our own values, lawyers will realize they cannot glide amidst the clouds of the “brooding omnipresence in the sky” as Holmes called the mythical notion of law. They will see that peace, equality, community, liberty, justice and other values are always at stake in the (international) law.
Source: BENSON, R.W.: “The Semiotics of International Law: Interpretation of the ABM Treaty” in: International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 1989 p. 257–276.
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- 1.
Robert W. Benson, “The Semiotic Web of the Law”, in Roberta Kevelson (ed.), Law and Semiotics, Vol. 1 (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1987), 35–63; idem, “How Judges Fool Themselves: The Semiotics of the Easy Case”, in Roberta Kevelson (ed.), Law and Semiotics, Vol. 2 (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1988), 31–60.
- 2.
Benson, supra n. l, “Semiotic Web”; idem, “Semiotics, Modernism and the Law”, Semiotica 73/1-2 (1989), 157–173; Joan C. Williams, “Critical Legal Studies: The Death of Transcendence and the Rise of the New Langdells”, New York University Law Review 62(3), (1987), 429–496.
- 3.
John Deely, “Pars pro Toto”, in John Deely (ed.), Frontiers in Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), vii–xxii.
- 4.
Peter Goodrich, Legal Discourse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); Benson, supra n. l, Semiotica; but see Bernard S. Jackson, Semiotics and Legal Theory (London, etc.: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985)
- 5.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958, 2nd ed.).
- 6.
Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1980).
- 7.
See Drucilla Cornell, “‘Convention’ and Critique”, Cardozo Law Review 7 (1986), 679–691; Williams, supra n. 2.
- 8.
The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); idem, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
- 9.
Supra n. 1 (1988).
- 10.
Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar, trans. by W. Weaver (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985).
- 11.
A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979); The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979); Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
- 12.
Robert W. Benson, “Peirce and Critical Legal Studies:”, in Roberta Kevelson (ed.), Peirce and Law (Dordrecht and Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishing, 1990).
- 13.
Thomas A. Sebeok, “The Semiotic Web: A Chronicle of Prejudices”, Bulletin of Literary Semiotics 2 (1975), 13.
- 14.
Peter Goodrich, Reading the Law (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
- 15.
United States Department of State, Office of Legal Adviser (1987): The ABM Treaty, Part I: Treaty Language and Negotiating History; Part II: Ratification Process; Part III: Subsequent Practice; Sam Nunn, “Interpretation of the ABM Treaty”, Part One: “The Senate Ratification Proceedings”, Congressional Record, March 11, 1987, S2967-S2986; Part Two: “Subsequent Practice Under the ABM Treaty”, Congressional Record, March 12, 1987, 53090-S3095; Part Three: “The ABM Negotiating Record”, Congressional Record, March 13, 1987, 53171-53173; Part Four: “An Examination of Judge Sofaer’s Analysis of the Negotiating Record”, Congressional Record, May 20, 1987, 56808-6831.
- 16.
Supra n. 14.
- 17.
Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, done May 23, 1969, United States Senate Exec. Law 92d Congress, 1st Session (1971).
- 18.
American Law Institute, Restatement of Foreign Relations Law of the United States (Revised) (Tentative Final Draft), 1985.
- 19.
Robert C. Toth, “U.S. Aides Confident SDI Won’t Block Treaty”, Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1988, I, 11; John Marks, “‘Taiwanization’ of SDI Allows the Dialogue to Continue”, Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1987.
- 20.
Michael Wines, “Tentative Afghan Pact is Reached”, Los Angeles Times, April, 1988, I, 1.
- 21.
Primo Levi, “Beyond Judgment”, The New York Review of Books 34(20), December 17, 1987, 10–14, at 14.
- 22.
From Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, “O Cao Sem Plumas” in Poesias Completas (1945–1965). Rio de Janeiro: Editora Sabia, 1968.
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Benson, R.W. (2015). Obligations II: The Semiotics of International Law: Interpretation of the ABMTreaty. In: Broekman, J., Catá Backer, L. (eds) Signs In Law - A Source Book. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09837-1_28
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