Legal Theory and Semiotics: On The Origins of Legal Semiotics

Abstract

Two semiotic regions of importance are opened for legal semiotic approaches: person and personhood, or: legal subjectand legal person; individual and corporation. They are keys to modern politics in relation (as the CLS movement correctly understood) with the understanding of an engenderment of the self, as Kant, Hobbes and others initiated, and with the understanding of personhood as a politico-socio-juridical issue of modern globalizing culture. The latter item leads to an extensive and critical view on the US “Citizens United” judgment, which not only influences major regions of the political landscape and the election of the Presidency in the US, but also profiles a new politics paradigm on the basis of a “semiotics of manipulation” supported by law.