The animating idea behind this book is that “a better understanding of linguistic communication may help us to a better understanding of legal regulation” . While for Marmor the philosophy of language has played a foundational role in the philosophy of law, The Language of Law is concerned more narrowly with “linguistic communication as a means of conveying legal content” . In preliminary statements Marmor foregrounds his interest in “the linguistic aspects of legal directives”, specifically “the boundaries between linguistic and (...) normative considerations in the inference to legal content of statutory law”. The aim is to articulate “how the legal determinants work” . These linguistic questions, Marmor argues, can be considered independently of any theory of law or of the nature of legal philosophy. His assumption is that “we can make some philosophical progress by paying close attention to the kind of speech acts that legal enactments are” . The underlying issue .. (shrink)

If the nineteenth century belonged to the littérateur, the twentieth saw the triumph of the critic and theorist. For the newly urbanized European nations, literature was understood as constructing...

This paper considers the tension between timelessness and timeboundedness in legal interpretation, examining parallels between sacred texts and secular law. It is argued that familiar dualities such as those between statute and judge-made law, law and equity, written and spoken discourse, dictionary meaning versus intended or contextual meaning, can be examined using this timeless/timebounded framework. Two landmark English cases, DPP v Shaw (1961) and R v R (1991) are analyzed as illustrating contrasting aspects of the socio-legal politics of “reasoning backwards”. (...) The related temporal distinction between ex ante and ex post points of view is examined both within legal theory and as a key issue for linguistic and semiotic systems. The argument is made that this distinction is the key to a wide range of methodological and theoretical problems in relating linguistics and semiotics to law. (shrink)