Semiotics and the space-time ingredients of legal experience

This chapter analyzes the role that semiotics could play in everyday legal experience. I try to show how the adoption of a semiotic approach to legal categorization could allow for the bringing to the surface of the implicit and silenced components underlying the categorization schemes of which legal rules are made. The main improvement to legal practice ensuing that emergence consists in making visible the relational landscapes including all of the elements of the situations placed under the lens of law, despite their space-time remoteness. This is because being remote in space and time is not synonymous with ‘semantically distant.’ The semiotic gaze is used precisely to debunk that synonymy and bestow the allegedly remote elements with the relevance they deserve with regard to the fundamental principles and values/ends of legal systems. This methodological move aims at overcoming the implications of the maxim ‘law makes its own law’ so as to increase pluralism and inclusiveness of law.