"Rethinking with the reader" [2019] ELECD 1373; in Broekman, M. Jan (ed), "Rethinking Law and Language" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) x

Book Title: Rethinking Law and Language

Editor(s): Broekman, M. Jan

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Section Title: Rethinking with the reader

Number of pages: 3

Extract:

Rethinking with the reader

BEYOND LAW
The "law­language" theme is more complex and more deeply engraved
in Occidental culture than thematic studies on the subject are able to
illustrate. It needs a thorough awareness of the cultural roots of the theme
and the courage to consider philosophical anchors when ties with the
specificity of legal discourse and actual tensions in modern culture are
envisaged. The rethinking of legal themes in language and linguistic
themes in law, as well as their inverse movements, appears to be richer
than a simple mutuality of motives. That is the reason to rethink the
"law­language" issue as a "law­language­law" theme. The theme is
embedded in Occidental cultural thought from the Middle Ages up to
today's globalization of law and language. In contrast to studies about
"words" or "styles" and "grammars," or the unfolding of specific legal
terminology such as "contract," "liability," or "legal capability," here the
focus is on the multilevel phenomenon of "speech" in law­language
relations.


BEYOND SPEAKER AND HEARER
The book invites us to rethink the contributions of jurists and legal
theoreticians, political thinkers, linguists, and philosophers of language
whose thought patterns were profiled by the "law­language­law" theme
in Western culture. Hobbes appears to have naively implied a language
model that endured throughout the ages of linguistic study and which
bears the name "Speaker­Hearer Model" even today; von Savigny is
studied in his critical texts on the Napoleonic Code and the conceptual-
ization of ...