Image Of Law Research Articles

Armed Conflicts, Images of Law and Legal Semiotics

Armed Conflicts, Images of Law and Legal Semiotics

Reimagining the Law

Abstract:Legal issues have long been a prominent part of the discourse of business ethics. This widespread attention to legal questions within business ethics arises primarily because specific legal issues are as a practical matter often intertwined with prominent ethical issues occurring in the workplace. Many of the central issues of business ethics—issues such as whistle blowing, insider trading, and workplace privacy—have significant legal dimensions.But this widespread attention to specific legal issues obscures a more significant deficiency within business ethics. This deficiency relates to the consideration of law at a much more fundamental level. Business ethics lacks any developed awareness of the images of law within its discourse.Unlike jurisprudence, the field of business ethics has little in the way of fully developed models or concepts of law. Rather, our understanding of the law here exists more at the level of images—general, unreflected-upon depictions of the law, determinate in some aspects, indeterminate in others.Such images are epistemologically potent, containing unexamined assumptions and exerting an often unrecognized influence over the development of our knowledge. As such, they deserve our attention, especially within a newly evolving field such as business ethics. Of particular importance to business ethics is how such images portray the relation of law to ethics.

Education in Canon Law

For a number of years the Society has been troubled at the absence of, or at least the spasmodic nature of, any systematic teaching about Canon or Ecclesiastical law among ordinands and clergy of the Church of England. The first that an ordinand knows of law is often his or her Declaration of Assent and licensing as an Assistant Curate. Provided there are no great crises or scandals, or problems over marriages when the training Incumbent goes on holiday leaving the new Deacon to his or her own devices, the next occasion of ecclesiastical law will be at first incumbency, or possibly as a Team Vicar. After that Faculties, secular employment law, the Children Act, the Charities Act, the Ecumenical Canons become increasingly important; not to speak of the Pastoral Measure in Teams and Groups. No other profession would allow its officers such systematic ignorance of the rules of the game, or be so tardy in providing them with a summary of their rights and responsibilities. Sadly the image of law—and lawyers—has obscured the need for knowledge of professional rules and good practice. A misunderstanding of St Paul on Law and Gospel has permeated much evangelical, charismatic and radical thinking. Anglo-Catholics have a perverse respect for the canon law of another church rather than their own. But the tide has begun to turn.

Peter Goodrich, Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. Pp xii + 279. $35.00 (ISBN 0520 08990 1).

This text offers a reading of legal history and institutional practice in the light of psychoanalysis and aesthetics. It explores the unconscious of law through historical and contemporary examples. The book provides an anatomy of law's melancholy and boredom, of addiction to law, of legal repressions, and the aesthetics of jurisprudence. It retraces the geneaology of law and invokes the failures and exclusions - the poets, women and outsiders - that legal science has left in its wake. In addition, the text analyzes the role and power of the image of law and details the history of law's plural jurisdictions and traditions of resistance to law. It also explores mechanisms of repression and representation as constituents of modern subjectivity, using medieval texts and early appearances of feminism as resources for the understanding and renewal of legal scholarship.

Of innocence, exclusion, and the burning of flags: The romantic realism of the law

This essay continues the challenge to the image of law as neutral adjudication by arguing that, while authoritative judicial discourse in the modern liberal state has presented itself as realistic discourse that argues to singular conclusions, it is better to see it as a profoundly rhetorical enterprise that writes legal decisions as romances in which Law is the heroic central character. Focusing on the first flag burning case Texas v. Johnson, the essay examines the decision as argument and as romance. It concludes by suggesting that the case (and legal decisions in general) would benefit from a sense of law at once more rhetorically sensitive, communal, and tragic.

Natural Law and Civilizations: Images of "Nature," Intracivilizational Polarities, and the Emergence of Heterodox Ideals

This article focuses on the role played by key civilizational categories, especially images of law, the state of nature, and several related notions in the gestation of heterodox ideals and movements in different civilizations. It focuses on the tensions and balances struck within the civilizational settings of Europe, China, and India between major (or orthodox) currents of and institutions and minor (or heterodox) ones. The conflicting outcomes derived from Stoic-Christian natural law in Europe (as described by Troeltsch) are compared with the structurally similar, yet differently composed and articulated, tensions in China between Confucian and Taoist ideals, while the altogether different outcomes in India (noted by Weber) are used as a third negative reference point. Similar problems in the Russian setting are briefly discussed as a fourth point of comparison. This paper concludes with theoretical reflections drawn from Marx, Toennies, and the Durkheim school on the explanation of such intracivilizational structures and processes. The central issue examined in this essay concerns the evident existence in all complex societies and civilizations of major and minor themes that represent competing ideals of life or alternative visions of the proper way to realize the ultimate values of the civilization. These polarities - to adapt Robert Hertz's term (1973) - are bound together within more comprehensive structures of consciousness. Although they often represent contradictory viewpoints, they co-exist in one or another complex tension, balance or imbalance, in Turner's (1969) words, as structure and antistructure. A second related problem area points to the investigation of the composition and orchestration of fundamental categories (Mauss, 1966:333-34) or unit ideas (Lovejoy, 1936) of civilizations seen as a perennial source of ideals and forms of thought from which both the major and minor tendencies draw renewed sustenance.

Historical Rhetoric and the Images of Law: Legal Fundamentalism as Ideology

Abstract The rhetoric and vocabulary that guide current debates over the role of the Supreme Court in judicial review reflect struggle between competing ideologies. Ideologies are preconscious explanations and rationales for guiding social action. In the political realm, ideologies provide the concepts and theories for policy, shape public discourse, and thus may become a form of rhetoric by which some groups attempt to persuade others in the value of their ideas. Hence, ideologies become one instrument in political struggle; they embody power contests between competing world views, policies and practices. In recent years, such a contest has occurred in the judicial realm, as legal fundamentalists have attempted to revise the history of Constitutional law as a means of implementing and solidifying political advantage. This paper examines “legal fundamentalism,” as exemplified particularly by Attorney General Edwin Meese, as an example of how historical interpretations reflect new ideologies that in turn h...

Images of Law in Everyday Life: The Lessons of School, Entertainment, and Spectator Sports

Some of us see law as largely marginal to American life (see, e.g., Macaulay, 1984), but other colleagues assert that law constitutes society. One position does not contradict the other because we are talking about different things. Cases, statutes, and enforcement agencies very seldom directly influence everyday life. At the same time, law is an important part of culture. Despite many debates (see, e.g., Hall, 1977; Harris, 1980; Ortner, 1984), legal culture affects everyday life in important ways. At the very least, it provides a vocabulary with which we rationalize our actions to others and ourselves. As Geertz (1983: 173, 232) insists, “law is not a bounded set of norms …, but part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real.” Law is “meaning … not machinery.” It is “a species of social imagination.” It “is constructive of social realities rather than merely reflective of them.”

Images of Law

Images of Law

REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:Images of Law. By Zenon Bankowski and Geoff MunghamThe Law of Torts. Fifth edition. By John G. FlemingThe Law of Defamation in Canada. By Jeremy S. WilliamsPrinciples of Labour Law. Second edition. By Roger W. RideoutThe Machinery of Succession. By J. Gareth MillerSmall Businesses. By Michael ChestermanThe Law of Bankers' Commercial Credits. Fifth edition. By H. C. Gutteridge and Maurice MegrahBanking Law and Practice in Australia. By W. S. Weerasooria and F. W. CoopsHandbook of the Law of Antitrust. By Lawrence Anthony SullivanAspects of the Hague Rules. By Malcolm Alistair ClarkeMagistrates' Justice. By Pat CarlenProbation and After‐Care: Its Development in England and Wales. by Dorothy BochelSeven Lectures on Human Rights. By J. D. Van der Vyver

Images of Law

Images of Law

Legal artefacts and the cultural code of law

Updating issues related to the issue of legal heritage, its constituents, its place and role in the development of law, directly related to the phenomenon of the cultural code of law and legal mentality. The legal heritage focuses on a special set of inside information that fills the content of modern legal life in its statics and dynamics.
 The idea of a legal culture is considered as an expression of one form of meaningful activity of people, which is to achieve a certain purpose. An example is the refraction of individual facts, knowledge, skills, which form the image of law in a person, which in the process of conscious interpretation and systematic repetition of the same practices, form legal experience, which is transformed into a higher form of assessment of legal facts, phenomena, events.
 Representing the basis of legal culture - the cultural code of law is a semiotic "matrix" of vital content, concentrated in the legal heritage, which in the process of professional lawyers activity will be filtered, the new will "erase" the previous, or adapt it to current conditions and broadcast into the future.
 For the legal culture, it is significant the correlation between codes (signaling) and how they are used (communication). In this context, the codes or the contents contained therein perform a signifying function, that is, a designation of legal phenomena. This happens with the rules of law, legal institutions, legal myths, rituals, any legal artifacts, the significance of which performs the inherent function of preserving and transmitting legal information to the addressee (social subject), and he perceives it, interpreting in their own actions and actions that are also significant to other participants in the legal relationship.
 The transmission of accumulated legal information is ensured by existence of the legal memory.
 Legal memory is a social-legal mechanism for updating content and values that are interpreted within a specific legal space and time. Here, legal memory is not perceived as an abstract concept, but as a system of content embedded in legal artifacts. Due to them, it is realized the connection of times. They (artifacts) become a kind of memory storage, both direct and indirect, which is read through contextual connections with other artifacts.
 In this way, the whole legal sphere can be regarded as an independent, single text of the legal content contained in the legal artifacts, which is united by the common cultural code and as a set of elements of the legal culture with its inherent set of codes.