When people think of law, they often imagine codified rules, courtrooms, and justice in black and white. Yet beneath these appearances lies a shifting terrain, a language in flux, filled with signs, gestures, faces, and evolving meanings.
Legal semiotics – the study of law through the lens of signs and symbols – breaks the illusion of fixed definitions and reveals the interpretive life of legal systems. It shows us that legal meaning is not etched in stone but is constructed through context, culture, and continual interpretation.
The semiotics of law teaches us to read law not as a closed book but as an open script, one filled with layers, silences, metaphors, and codes.
This essay explores how the semiotics of law reframes our understanding of law, not as a static institution but as a dynamic communicative process, shaped by time, space, culture, and human experience.
A Legal System in Constant Transfer
Legal semiotics begins with a simple yet profound idea: legal meaning is never inherent, it is made. Every statute, ruling, or doctrine is a sign that points beyond itself. Meaning is shaped by its interpreter and filtered through social norms, emotional resonances, and cultural knowledge.
Legal semiotics reminds us that the same rule can yield different outcomes depending on how it is framed.
Rather than being a closed system, the law becomes a space of open-ended interpretation or ‘open texture’, responsive to change.
This perspective echoes the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, who proposed that a sign’s meaning emerges through an infinite chain of interpretations.
Each legal concept – whether “justice”, “contract”, or “liability” – does not hold meaning alone but gains significance as it is understood, debated, and applied. The law, therefore, functions as a living discourse, constantly reconstructed in practice.
Beyond the Letter: Culture in the Fabric of Law
Legal meaning is not confined to language alone; it is embedded in culture. From the architecture of a courtroom to the symbolism of a judge’s robe, the law communicates through images, gestures, faces, and rituals. This non-verbal language is just as vital to legal understanding as any written text.
What is considered “fair” or “legal” is deeply influenced by local customs, historical memory, and shared values; that is, its multi-modality. For example, the same legal term may carry important different connotations in civil law versus common law traditions. Semiotics of Law emphasizes that signs draw from cultural reservoirs. Meaning is always situated: what a law means in one society may not translate directly in another.
Legal traditions, then, are not universal languages but jargons shaped by the social context in which they operate. The law evolves with its community, and its signs adapt to the shared experiences of those who interpret and apply them.
Law Without a Center: A Rhizomatic View
One of the most powerful metaphors for understanding legal semiotics is that of the rhizome. Borrowed from philosophy, the rhizome is a structure without a central root, branching in unpredictable, multidirectional ways. Applied to law, this metaphor suggests that legal development is not linear or hierarchical but sprawling and interconnected.
Legal ideas do not grow like trees – from precedent to precedent in a tidy chain – but shoot off in surprising directions. They are influenced by other legal systems, social movements, and even visual media. A doctrine in one country might resurface in another, transformed by new needs and contexts.
This rhizomatic model explains why law often appears fragmented or contradictory. Yet that fragmentation is not a flaw – it is a sign of life. Law is not a closed code but a network of meanings in motion, negotiated through time, across borders, and between actors.
The Visual and Digital Turn: New Signs, New Challenges
In today’s digitized world, law no longer speaks solely through texts. It now navigates visual and symbolic forms of communication. Emojis, memes, and digital gestures have entered the legal lexicon, particularly in cases involving cyber communication, harassment, or criminal signaling.
A heart emoji or a flame might seem trivial, yet in court they can become signs carrying legal weight, suggesting intent, agreement, or threat. Their interpretation varies across platforms, cultures, and users, complicating legal reasoning. What one party sees as harmless, another might read as hostile.
This digital transformation illustrates how semiotics is not just about interpretation – it is about misinterpretation, too. Legal systems must now grapple with the ambiguity of digital signs and how they blur traditional boundaries between speech and image, intention and effect.
The semiotics of Law of the digital face, in this sense, becomes an essential tool for courts and lawmakers navigating the messy terrain of modern communication.
Law as Performance: The Role of the Interpreter
The creation of legal meaning is not passive; it is an act of performance, an act of mediation. Judges, lawyers, and citizens all play roles in interpreting the signs of law. In this performance, context is everything. A law’s meaning can shift depending on who is interpreting it, in what setting, and for what purpose.
Legal semiotics reminds us that the same rule can yield different outcomes depending on how it is framed. A contract clause, for instance, might be read narrowly in one case and expansively in another, depending on societal values or judicial philosophy. These shifts are not errors—they are part of the interpretive dance that gives law its dynamism.
Meaning in law is never finally settled; it is always provisional, awaiting its next context, its next interpreter, its next sign.
The Multilingual, Multisystem Lawscape
Law today operates in a multilingual and multisystemic world, where jurilinguistics/legal linguistics along with lawyer-linguists/jurilinguists play a pivotal role. National laws intersect with international treaties, Indigenous legal traditions, and corporate governance codes. Legal semiotics helps explain how meaning travels – or fails to – across these boundaries.
In pluralistic societies, one must often navigate several legal languages at once. A land claim, for example, might be recognized under customary law but not under statutory law. Semiotics allows us to see how these systems speak differently and how translation between them is never perfect, also known as “legal formant”.
Rather than seeking a single “correct” interpretation, the semiotics of law encourages us to listen across these languages, spaces, and traditions—to recognize law as a polyphonic, and often contested, conversation.
The Ethical Edge of Interpretation
There is a deeper ethical dimension to semiotics. If meaning is made – not given – then those who make it bear responsibility. Legal actors are not neutral scribes but active participants in shaping justice. The words chosen, the metaphors invoked, the images circulated—all have consequences.
Legal semiotics asks:
- Who benefits from a particular interpretation?
- Who is excluded?
- Who gets to decide what a sign means?
These questions are not only academic, but they rely also on power, equity, and access to justice. Understanding law semiotically is thus not only a method of analysis; it is an act of accountability.
Conclusion: Reading Between the Lines of Law
The semiotics of law teaches us to read law not as a closed book but as an open script, one filled with layers, silences, metaphors, and codes. It reveals law as a living system of communication, shaped by the contexts it inhabits and the people who engage with it.
To study the semiotics of law is to study the law’s capacity to mean differently over time. It is to recognize that law is not a matter of decoding definitions but of constructing understandings. It requires attention not only to what is said, but to what is unsaid; not only to what is written, but to what is shown, felt, and assumed.
Ultimately, the semiotic view challenges us to see the law not as fixed but as fluid, not as a tool of closure, but as a site of possibility. In this view, law is not merely a system of rules, it is a language we all help write, a knowledge in change.
That is the reason why the International Handbook of Legal Language and Communication, conceived as an authoritative, reference-style work organized thematically like an encyclopedia and edited by Anne Wagner, is so timely and essential. It will contain almost 1,000 chapters from a great variety of regions worldwide to ensure a truly comparative perspective.
