Listening to Distant Voices

Abstract

The “digital revolution”, which the juridical observer is asked to tackle, as well as the consequences that legal experts have to deal with, is not an abstract phenomenon. Digitalisation is a consequence and the latest manifestation of the Western culture of the machine. This framework shapes the various concepts of language, political community, and justice, on which, in turn, the diverse current views of the interpreter depend. The twentieth century’s globalisation of legal civilisation has perfected the machinery of legal talk. The mechanics of legal decision rules are based upon the automatism of the sentence, the predicative language. Law appears as a “black box”. The increase of law’s authority and persuasive power depends exactly on this. As the function of rhetoric is to make us see the means of persuasion around each argument, the analysis of law is a matter of rhetoric. Rhetoric analyses particular forms of legal talk as contents. The paper suggests that the basic question of the interpreter’s reasonableness is of how to speak of law and justice without coming under the sway of a world-view that treats all law in the terms of the instrumental strategies and technologies typical of the modern society of control. In my opinion, the interpreter’s role demands him to become a speaker of a real lingua franca, a language appropriate for making distant voices communicate.