Being built on the ground of mutual effect, facing the current state-isolation, international law is losing its grip on efficiency. This makes some of us to question (1) If law is not working, do we still need law? If we would say no, the history shows that such is the path to the state-suicide. As Smithian mutual benefits is the assurance of the individual benefits, we need international relationships to create the benefits for the individual states, hence international law, Yet (...) the current one is certainly not working, then, the question, (2) What should the international law be? The enforcement of the international law could be accomplished through the blockchain. As blockchain “went bypass” the national law, and simply negated it, yet it is still not immune to the scope of international jurisdiction. We also argue that the blockchain’ smart contract is not sufficient enough to operate smoothly. Human brain is structured as the mirror rather than a glass and transferring the law interpretation to the machine would not work, hence, we designed the formula of langue and parole, blockchain multiseg operating under the semiotics of the international law. Here the language learning is modelled with the supervisory and reinforcing algorithms, with supervisory predetermined with bias X,Y towards the values of law. Sort of form of constant repetends of Heidegger’s hermeneutics circle. The most important part in this paper is written with the purpose to explain that international law is at the same struggle that Kafka had. Carrying the weight of both, the clothed façade and true self, first being the morality guide and later the states will, and not being neither, international law is self-isolated from the real world, as Gregor Samsa was. Hence, this is not the paper of secularization, no customs, no higher purpose, nothing except the will of states, that can be constantly renewed with the signifier and signified being linked and re-linked. (shrink)

Despite its popularity in recent theorisations of law as an artifact, the idea that law is an immaterial being, independent from even the documents that contain legal acts, has not been subjected to a focused analysis. This paper fills this noticeable gap. After providing generalizing account of the Immateriality Thesis, based on its different expositions in the literature, the paper criticises it. First, it argues that it is based on the counterfactual assumption that semantic content can exist beyond any carrier (...) for itself. The paper then elaborates on the thesis’ empirical implausibility, particularly its ignorance of how much the law is as it is due to writing. Third, the paper reveals how the thesis is difficult to combine with other jurisprudential issues, notably law’s effectiveness. Following such a critique, the paper considers the possible origins of and reasons for the thesis. Given its highly questionable character, the paper concludes with some general ideas on taking law’s materiality seriously. (shrink)

Gendered language is becoming a matter of serious concern for legal drafters and policymakers because 'it is always changing as societal views change' (The University of Calgary: Office of diversity, equity and protected disclosure 2017:1). Many western countries have made considerable progress towards using inclusive legal language. However, inclusive language is not implemented in other parts of the World; the Arab World is no exception. This may be due to the violation of language rules, the decline of language, and the (...) lack of enough evidence that changing the language will change society (Brown in ABA J, 2019) and (Brown in ABA J: 24–26, 2018). In this paper, I explore the challenging socio-cultural and linguistic factors that may hinder the implementation of gender-inclusive language in Arabic and explain the current situation in two current constitutions of Egypt and Tunisia in particular. The main aim of this paper is to conduct a comparative analysis of terminology representing gender in the Egyptian (2014, amended 2019) and Tunisian (2014) Arabic-English Constitutions using corpus-based tools. The analysis shows inconsistent attempts at a more inclusive source text through using neutral terms and adding inclusive pre-modifiers to these terms. It also shows inconsistent translation of gender-specific terminology and pronominal references. Both constitutions explicitly stress the ‘eradication of violence against women’ and express parity between ‘women’ and ‘men’ in terms of ‘equal rights’ and ‘appropriate political representation’ (e.g. in the Egyptian House of Representatives (28%) and the Tunisian Assembly of People’s Representatives (26%)) (International Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance, IDEA 2021). Although these percentages are not far away from the representation of women in European countries such as the United Kingdom (35%) (International Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance, IDEA 2021), it is the reality of women’s actual roles, change they initiate and their impact in the society that counts. (shrink)

This article is the first attempt to justify the "next" milestone in the development of legal realism: hyperrealism. The implications of digitalization have become the new fuel for the legal realist's jurisprudence prediction theory, that is, empirical research to predict the judge's or the court's decision. Indeed, that was impossible for American realists in the early twentieth century, and all the attempts failed. Therefore, tools such as Judicial Analytics allow us to prove that personal motives and prejudices affect a dispute's (...) resolution. Based on a systemic, comparative, and interdisciplinary analysis that intermingles legal theory, data analytics and digital technologies, the article substantiates the concept of hyperrealism itself. It evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of its primary tool—judicial analytics. The authors state the necessity of creating regulatory mechanisms of "curbing" to use them to improve justice and minimize the risk of rights violations. They propose using tools of expert evaluation, standardization, and ethical regulation of forensic analysis. (shrink)

This article deals with the construction and performance of antisemitism in Nazi children’s books. It provides an explorative discourse analysis of _Trust No Fox_ as reported (Bauer, Trau keinem Fuchs auf grüner Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid! Ein Bilderbuch für Gross und Klein, Stürmer-Verlag, Nuremberg, 1936) and _The Poisonous Mushroom_ as reported (Hiemer, Der Giftpilz—ein Stürmerbuch für Jung u. Alt, Stürmer-Verlag, Nuremberg, 1938) through the lens of Critical applied legal linguistics (CrALL). It seeks to elucidate how ‘Jewishness’ is (...) constructed in the two books, with a view to enhancing our understanding of the intertextual and interdiscursive embeddedness of anti-Semitic rhetoric generally and nomination and predication strategies specifically. To this end, a specialised corpus of 10,002 tokens, 2,345 types and 43 illustrations was compiled. Subsequently XML annotation was applied with the data being parsed into headings, sentences and/or lines. It was found that the books follow a Jewish/non-Jewish dichotomy, consistently referring to breaches of custom, morality, religion and law. Both works purport to provide descriptive accounts of ‘Jews as they are,’ when, in fact, they generate the normative illusion of ‘Jews as they ought to be’ according to Nazi ideology. It is suggested to use the insights gained into the anti-Semitic rhetoric of children’s books to detect, describe and critique patterns of anti-Semitic rhetoric today. (shrink)

In 2021, a second updated edition of Eschig’s and Pircher-Eschig’s translation of the Austrian Civil Code (ABGB) (Allgemeines bürgerliches Gesetzbuch für die gesammten deutschen Erbländer der Oesterreichischen Monarchie (ABGB 1811). (as amended), 2023) was released. This edition holds particular relevance due to its potential applicability across a spectrum of players operating at the intersection of language and (civil) law, including legal professionals, the hospitality industry, and mediators. We find that this comprehensive translation may not only serve as a valuable resource (...) for (legal) practice but also holds significance for research in diverse fields, including (applied) legal linguistics, lexicography, translation studies, and comparative law. Moreover, this translation alleviates the challenges faced by practitioners inside and outside of law when dealing with legal concepts and lexis, along with their interdependencies in continental civil law discourse. We suggest that the work is particularly useful for legal departments of international companies, but also for hotel chains and/or mediation offices, seeking insights into the specifics of the Austrian legal-linguistic landscape. While computer-assisted translation and machine translation cannot be denied their utility, they should not be seen as capable of entirely replacing human expertise. Indeed, machine translations may not be able to capture the subtle multi-faceted interplay of emerging legal, linguistic, and/or cultural contexts when dealing with the legal concepts and interrelated terminology of the ABGB. In conclusion, we acknowledge the significance of high-quality legal translations, as the one under review, that have been thoroughly reviewed by human experts, thus contributing to saving time and resources. (shrink)

Different countries worldwide have issues with adapting legal terminology in a multilingual society. Such issues are still prevalent in Kazakhstan, where it is particularly difficult to guarantee the quality of laws written in the state language. This study aims to answer the question of what scientific, methodological, and legal mechanisms can be used to enhance legislative drafting practises in countries with two or more official languages by using Kazakhstan as an example. The Kazakh legal terminology reflects the societal communication requirements (...) for the control of public relations. According to the findings, the current challenges of establishing a legal conceptual framework in Kazakhstan are closely connected to trends in expanding the terminological lexicon. This trend stems from neologisation, optimisation of borrowings of legal terms, and internationalisation of legal discourse. The ways to improve the legislative drafting technique are suggested based on a generalised analysis of texts in the state language of some legislative instruments of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The article offers several recommendations for specialists-translators of legal texts practising in rule-making and lawyers-specialists in legislative drafting and review. (shrink)

This corpus analysis of linguistic and semantic features in French parliamentary debates concerning online hate speech regulation, highlights tensions between state powers and private rights. Two key themes are identified: first, the _problem of definition_: how such online content is defined in the debates, and second, the _problem of regulation_: how the debates negotiate the supra-jurisdictional and individual jurisdiction issues involved, in regulating both the global online content and the responsibilities of the owners of the platforms who manage the content. (...) For this analysis, the authors created a corpus of French National Assembly Examination Committee discussions and public sessions between July 2019 to January 2020 discussing the _Loi Avia _(Avia Law). The corpus was analysed using quali-quantitative methods. Overall, the study combines a top-down (global) and a bottom-up (local) analysis of the data, applying corpus semantic approaches (Lecolle et al. in Langages 210(2):35–54, 2018; Rastier in The Routledge handbook of semantics, Routledge, pp 507–522, 2015) to contextualize the analysis of the meta-discourse (Hyland in Meta-discourse: exploring interaction in writing, 1st ed. Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350063617 ). The analysis highlights the linguistic features revealing the power dynamics inherent within the discourse and counter-discourse of the dominant and opposition political parties respectively. (shrink)

We report on the first stage of a project on the representations of gender in the coverage of the Arab Spring by Western media. We focus on designing comparable corpora to examine Arab women’s depiction in English and German news during the uprisings. The English corpus is composed of reports published by _The Guardian and The New York Times_. The German corpus consists of articles collected from _Der Spiegel, Die Welt_, _Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,_ and _Süddeutsche Zeitung_. The datasets (...) were processed through Sketch Engine to identify the terms collocating with _women_ in the English corpus and _Frau_ in the German one. Then, the themes reflected by these expressions in the two corpora were compared. The results show that both news media feature two types of topical frames linked to Arab women; one is associated with the uprisings while the other is related to their recurrent stereotypes in Western news discourse. Yet, there are discrepancies between their focus on related issues to each type. Other differences between the two sets of news outlets include intensity of reporting on Arab women and stressing their nationalities. These findings suggest that although Arab women’s negative stereotypes continued to feature in western news discourse during the Arab Spring, new positive images emerged and contributed to changing their depictions in global media. (shrink)

Arab and English cultures are incongruent, where the former is greatly influenced by religion when compared to the latter. This study focuses on court interpreting from Arabic into English and questions the interpreters’ objectivity when rendering religious and cultural expressions, bearing in mind that certain cultures, like the Arab and Muslim ones, have significant religious ties. To this end, fifteen transcripts were randomly collected from Canadian court hearings. The analysis showed that interpreting religious and cultural expressions can be complex, especially (...) when the original speaker attempts to transmit a notion that may have negative implications in the target language. The results also showed that court interpreters either added explanations to religious and cultural expressions or omitted them. Such additions and omissions may be used to avoid negative stereotypes other cultures have about Muslims and Arabs. The study recommends that future researchers interested in legal interpreting consider the non-verbal factors that can be observed during court hearings. The study suggests allocating extensive training sessions to interpreters on how to impartially render culture-bound expressions, mainly in the legal context. (shrink)

The study focuses on the translatability of EU terminology into Ukrainian, with a specific emphasis on the term ‘regulation’. It explores the challenges and considerations involved in translating legal terms, particularly within the context of EU legislative acts. The concept of translatability potential is substantiated in the article. It is seen as language pair-dependent, influenced by the availability of similar legal concepts in the target law system, equivalent terms in the target language, and other factors. The research delves into the (...) levels of translatability potential of legal terms, taking into consideration the existence of identical concepts in the target legal system, the mono- or polysemic semantic structure of the source term, and the established translation practices accepted by legal professionals. Based on these criteria, legal terms are classified into categories of high, upper-medium, lower-medium, and low translatability potentials. The article applies these criteria to analyse the translatability potential of the term ‘EU regulation’ in Ukrainian legal discourse. The distinction between legal terms and legal concepts are highlighted, and the concepts are considered to be mental representations associated with linguistic units. The corpus method and concept analysis are employed to analyse the impact of the context on the actualisation of specific components of semantic structure and, correspondingly, specific concepts. The use of the terms in ordinary and legal discourse is under analysis, as well as different Ukrainian translations of ‘regulation’ for each concept it manifests. Finally, the semantic structures of the term ‘EU regulation’ and its Ukrainian translation ‘peглaмeнт (rehlament)’ are compared to reveal the semantic shifts caused by translation. The concept and semantic analyses are conducted to explore the realisation of the translatability potential and see if the best option provided by the potential of the term was selected to meet the high requirements of legal translation. (shrink)

Taking hints from the Italian writer and comedian Paolo Villaggio’s works having the unlucky-to-the-utmost accountant Fantozzi as their hero, the essay tackles the issue of the role, and the possible foundations, of the law in the theoretical scenario of a perfectly deterministic world, where everything is determined by pre-set nexuses of cause-and-effect. Fantozzi is condemned by such an inescapable law of causation (Fate) to meet constant failure, in a social context structured along stiff hierarchies which are completely independent from individual (...) merits, where law enforcement always sides with the lucky ones. Within such a context, the law cannot be grounded on rational foundations-thinking, since the only possible rational conclusion is that the law is completely useless. At the same time, the law cannot be considered an outcome of power, since any power different from that of Fate is mere illusion. The essay wonders whether, in such a theoretical setting, there is the possibility of finding an alternative foundation for the law on non-objectifying thinking, starting from imagination and the idea of justice. Is it possible to imagine reliable rules based on imagination? (shrink)

The relevance of the research problem is due to the need for theoretical justification for determining the structure of the principles of legal responsibility. The purpose of the article is to clarify the structure of the principles of legal responsibility in Ukraine. The leading methodological approach of the research is the structural-functional approach, which allows to consider the principles of legal responsibility as elements of the normative part of the legal system, which have their own functional purpose. The article defines (...) the structure of the principles of legal responsibility; it was established that certain legal responsibility principles were considered as essential elements of the system of legal responsibility principles; the basic requirements for the structure of the legal responsibility principles, which make up its content, are revealed. (shrink)

The crux of the present paper is that Fiqh can be considered as a religious apparatus mediating between the spheres of divine addressivity and Sharia performativity. The former may manifest itself as the addressing of a spectral prophetic figure or the hidden Imām; however, the latter may emerge in the form of a responsive-performative discourse characterized paradoxically by the autonomy of ontology, heteronomy of force and pen-ultimacy of statements. By fabricating a sacred archive, establishing some hermeneutical devices (generative and interpretative), (...) and designating authentic archons, Fiqh as a mediating factor determines the ultimate form of the performative discourse of Sharia and renders the spectral addressing into a sonorous imperative tone. With regard to their various semiotic procedures, different Fiqh apparatuses, in Islamic worlds, lead to divergent and sometimes discordant binding discourses ranging from sovereign and generative Sharia laws to suspended divine rules. (shrink)

Digital games can be considered as composed of two main components: the props, i.e. visual, textual, and aural elements such as codes, 3D models and animations; and the form, specially the interaction between players and games, the act of playing itself. This dichotomy thus begs the question whether digital games are indeed games if nobody plays them, and ultimately: who is the owner of the gameplay and any by-product of the interaction between the game and the players? This paper explores (...) the copyright status of content created by users with digital games, such as gameplay videos and images, for example art based on digital game assets, namely virtual photography; as well as customized in-game objects. Many modern digital games offer considerable freedom to players, in terms of how the action on screen evolves and the visual outcomes that the game can produce. Scholars have asserted that digital games avatars, the characters created in games, should be considered a joint work between players and the game developers and some game companies allow the commercial use of videos created from their games. Conversely, other companies expressly prohibit such use, and issue DMCA takedown notices to infringers. Attention will be devoted to specific games as authorial tools, such as _SpaceEngine_ and _Townscaper_, where there are neither objectives nor challenges, but they are rather tools that enable players’ creativity. (shrink)

This contribution focuses on legal issues raised by the audiovisual broadcasting of performing arts, which has significantly increased due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. First, we contextualize this practice and briefly present the emergence and evolution of the practice of “filmed theater”, as well as any other form of performances (e.g., concert, ballet, opera) originally conceived for the stage but subsequently diffused through other channels. Secondly, we address the current legal issues that have arisen because of the increase of such practice (...) due to the containment measures taken by government. Two axes are of particular attention: the matter of copyrights and related rights, on the one hand, and the question of public financing, on the other. Concerning intellectual property, audiovisual broadcasting leads to several legal consequences and issues: effectiveness of related rights, emergence of new modes of exploitation and new authors, recognition of the recording as an original work, etc. This new practice is, moreover, likely to disrupt the categories established by public funding legal mechanisms, which are often poorly adapted to hybrid artistic objects. The objective of this part is therefore to analyze the new legal issues raised by the audiovisual distribution of performances. Finally, we go beyond exclusively legal issues to examine the very specificities of performing arts and, more specifically, the possible loss that would result from a fixation of a production on a reproducible medium, making its diffusion possible beyond the stage. (shrink)

In contemporary society, information unsurprisingly morphed into commodity. The IT industry that functions in the market economy and that perceives information as commodity encountered numerous problems that are related to specific features of information. These problems triggered two parallel developments aiming at the protection of intellectual property claimed for the creation of informational contents. On the one side, traditional intellectual property laws were expanded to cover certain aspects of privately owned or privately claimed cultural information. On the other side, new (...) technological devices were developed to provide technological protection for information defined as private property. Tensions and rivalry between both areas of regulation, legal and technological, became particularly visible within the debate about Digital Rights Management (DRM). This debate emerged as a response to institutionalized legal protection of intellectual property that was frequently perceived in the concerned industry as rigid and inadequate. Nowadays, tensions between legal and technological means of protection remain problematic in the emerging law of information. These tensions are rooted in mutually excluding economic interests, yet also in the concepts in which they are expressed and regulated. Therefore, this essay analyzes processes of concept creation in the named approaches to information perceived as commodity. It shows that the adequate solution of regulatory problems depends upon the clarification of conceptualization processes in legislative initiatives rather than on compromises related to economic interests of stakeholders taking part in the debate about the appropriate attribution of digital property rights. This essay concludes upon the idea that legislative measures constitute the most efficient mechanism to regulate social conflicts, not only in the area of digital law. As a further consequence of this finding, the author proposes an overhaul of the concept of copyright as the first step towards a better conceptual framing of the law of cultural contents. (shrink)

This article discusses which barriers hamper access to, and participation in, cultural life for members of vulnerable groups, in particular persons belonging to old and new minorities and persons with disabilities in the context of digitization. It then examines what role public authorities can play in addressing and dismantling these barriers. The article adopts a bottom-up approach, in that it is based on a qualitative study, which gives voice to vulnerable groups. The qualitative research involved interviews with different organisations representing, (...) or working with, vulnerable groups in 12 European Union Member States (Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Malta and Spain). In that regard, the article approaches vulnerability from a distinct conceptual standpoint, identifying vulnerability as a condition caused by structural barriers. On the whole, the article shows that, while digitization of cultural content, goods and services, offers increased opportunities for culture to be democratised and for its consumption by wider and more varied audiences to be enhanced, it also engenders structural barriers and creates additional challenges. Furthermore, while digitisation has ensured more diverse representation in cultural content, vulnerable groups still face stereotypical and negative portrayals within mainstream cultural content. The thematic analysis of the qualitative interviews also captures different dimensions of access to digital cultural and supports the identification of effective policy measures to bridge the ‘digital divide’ and assist in the fulfilment of cultural rights of vulnerable groups. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced libraries to shift their service-delivery model online, infiltrating countless interactions–from storytime to reference questions to social groups–into digital mediation, typically by third-party platforms outside the library’s control, generating mineable, persistent digital traces. One community particularly vulnerable to the impacts of surveillance is the queer community, where an outing, at least in the United States, imposes a potential loss of housing and employment and may subject the outed person to violence. Libraries–particularly public and school libraries–have once (...) again become sites of conflict and resistance, with queer people and materials increasingly coming under attack both physically and legally. A primary shield by which libraries try to protect their patrons from such attacks is “privacy.” Librarians, as professionals, proclaim a commitment to privacy embedded in such documents as the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institution’s Statement on Privacy in the Library Environment. However, these ideals exist in broader systems–including legal and cultural structures–which constrain and complicate abstract commitments to privacy. This article examines the challenges of queer digital privacy within libraries in the United States, focusing on the polysemous, boundary-crossing nature of queerness, the digital and the material, privacy, and libraries (as both concepts and institutions). In particular, this article demonstrates how binary-bound, individual-rights-oriented legal approaches to privacy have arisen, and been mediated, by cis-heteronormative patriarchal values and how the sociotechnical materialities in which they occurred (such as paper-based recordkeeping) are fundamentally incompatible with queer privacy needs. (shrink)

While digitization claims to provide efficiency, accessibility, expansion, speediness, and profit accumulation, it is actually colonizing every human activity. It has even become a purpose in itself. In this essay we focus on the digitization of legal practices and contents. We describe what digitization encompasses, how digitalization processes work, and to what extent they are able to replace juristic processes and produce legal outcomes. We are inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay on the influence of mechanical reproduction of the works of (...) Art. Parallel to Benjamin’s work on Art, we will analyze Law and the consequences of innovations such as mechanical mass (re)production and computerized digitization. (shrink)

‘The Debauched Commons: A Dark Parable’ summarizes issues regarding intellectual property rights and immaterial culture through a nuanced reading of how First Nations Peoples worldwide have been forced by forms of neoliberal-capitalist exploitation of the knowledge commons to ring-fence and/or commodify their lived traditions, in many cases dating back 100,000 years and clearly predating any and all Western (First World) concepts of ownership. The intention of the structuralist-inspired reading of this enforced defensive position is to emphasize and clarify issues concerning (...) prior art and moral rights, two of the most ambiguous and gamed elements of copyright and patent law. Drawing upon the international context of the _Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples_ (2007) and the _Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Heritage_ (2003), this essay will focus, in part, on the travails of Aboriginals in Australia as representative of First Peoples worldwide and their long-exploited and long-expropriated traditions, inclusive of land, but foremost _lived knowledge_, but also their often compromised position _vis-à-vis_ various Australian state and Commonwealth legislation concerning recognition of their copyright, moral rights, and intellectual property rights. In this complex dance between tradition, heritage, and law, the so-called public domain often also becomes a de facto warehouse for the eventual conversion of intangible rights to collectively held and stored cultural property, which is then leveraged and/or converted to cultural capital by both public institutions and private companies. The primary premise of the analytic to be applied is that commodification of knowledge is more or less co-equal to the digitization of culture and the regimes of expropriation and/or outright theft associated with platform cultures. Platform culture, in turn, implicates otherwise benign, or apparently benign institutions (for example, academia and the art world) claiming to advance understanding and resolution of the twin nemeses of post-contemporary cultural politics—diversity and justice. The subtle machinations of what has come to be called the art-academic industrial complex will thus be analyzed for implicit and explicit practices that are reducible to the appropriation of native rites and rights, and laws and lores, for self-serving reasons inclusive of radical-chic posturing and politically correct tokenism. (shrink)

This article concerns the conflict between copyright and museums’ digitisation and online sharing of collections. This issue has recently become particularly important in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors outline the concept of a virtual museum and present the most important copyright provisions in EU law that may create obstacles for cultural institutions in realising virtual counterparts. To perceive copyright as the main obstacle in the process of digitisation and online sharing of collections is not unusual. Hence, the article (...) briefly presents legal framework of the European copyright applicable to such situations. The authors argue that although copyright offers a range of possibilities for museums interested in digitising their collections, at the same time it is responsible for a _chilling effect_, resulting in fear of potential infringement and liability. The authors conclude that the EU’s development of new legislation, coinciding with the need for digitisation and online sharing of cultural heritage caused by the pandemic, has favoured public interest at the expense of creators’ rights, but still lacks satisfactory legal tools for effectively allowing cultural institutions to digitise and share their collections. (shrink)

New technologies provide great opportunities for cultural heritage to become more widely accessible and for cultural experience to be more meaningful. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the strengths and vulnerabilities of the cultural heritage sector and the need to accelerate its digital transformation to make the most of the opportunities it provides. The Commission Recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation (2011/711/EU) concluded that there is an urgent need to protect and preserve European cultural (...) heritage, and, in particular, endangered cultural heritage is still present. However, the diversity of legal approaches to cultural heritage by the Member States discourages the creation of a common European data space for cultural heritage as the European Commission recently proclaimed. In Greece, there have been significant efforts in recent decades to digitise and digitally preserve cultural heritage goods. However, the attention was not drew upon the accessibility and reuse of the digitized cultural heritage content. According to the relevant regulatory framework the existing rules on the use of digital technologies for the reproduction, use and preservation of cultural heritage content is obviously outdated. According to the paragraphs 4 and 5 of article 46 of the Greek Code for the protection of antiquities and cultural heritage in general (Law 4858/2021), a previous permission granted by the Ministry of Culture is required for the production, reproduction and dissemination to the public of impressions, copies or depictions of monuments belonging to the Public Sector, or immovable monuments that are located within archaeological sites and historical places or are isolated, or movable monuments that are kept in museums or public collections, in any way and by any means whatsoever, including Information Communication Technologies. Such permission is granted to natural or legal persons for a fee paid to the Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development (HOCRED) upon the decision of the Minister of Culture, while the decision also specifies the temporal validity of the permission, the terms on which the permission is granted and the fee that must be paid. The production, reproduction and use of the aforementioned goods for other purposes, such as artistic, educational or scientific purposes, is again allowed for a fee paid to HOCRED, however, the fee can be waived upon the decision of the Minister of Culture. This Paper will examine the existing Greek legal framework and will attempt to propose an appropriate framework that will ensure open access to the digitized cultural heritage assets, enhance the recovery and transformation of the cultural heritage sector and support cultural heritage institutions in becoming more empowered and more resilient in the future. (shrink)

Trade treaties and legal agreements generally left Indigenous peoples and colonized communities out of negotiations that directly impacted them. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, informed by decolonial thinking and Nishnaabeg epistemology, this research study analyzed the language of five public documents, published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), surrounding the protection of Traditional Knowledge (TK) through the _sui generis_ legal figure and its connection to the development of digitization TK. As TK is largely uncommodifiable, (...) the ability to identify and protect TK through Intellectual Property Rights within the WIPO and the WTO is encumbered. The research analyzed and explored how language and knowledge shape policy and ideology against historically marginalized people and communities through discourse enacted by the WIPO and the WTO. (shrink)

Considering that culture is the product of creative and human processes, it is believed that intellectual property is a legal tool that allows for its protection given that it helps conserve, safeguard and preserve its tangible and/or intangible assets. In the case of digital heritage, which is made up of digital elements that should be preserved due to their cultural value, some challenges have arisen regarding their legal protection. One of these challenges is the lack of clarity about how the (...) elements that comprise it should be protected, giving rise to doubts about how intellectual property should help solve this conflict. This article presents the discussion regarding the protection of digital heritage in Colombia, how copyright is becoming an instrument that contributes to its legal protection, and the challenges to further develop it in the country. (shrink)

In _Fairfax Media Publications Pty Ltd v Voller_ (‘_Voller_’) the Australian High Court held that media companies maintaining Facebook comment pages could be liable for the defamatory posts of commenters on those sites. The decision focussed entirely on whether, by maintaining the Facebook page, the companies had ‘published’ the statements of commenters. Hearings on other aspects of the tort litigation continue. This paper considers the implications of the tort of defamation on public participation on political will formation where, as is (...) increasingly the case, the participation occurs virtually. Australian law has already tackled the law of defamation as a threat to freedom of political communication; _Voller_ continues the jurisprudence by considering whether hosting an online forum for debate amounts to publication. The more recent High Court judgment in _Google LLC v Defteros_ demonstrated the necessity of the law to align the ‘acts’ necessary to found legal action with the new environment of automated search engines. The troubled intersection of dematerialised practices of political and cultural discourse and jurisdictionally bound laws of defamation challenges participatory governance as tribes form and dissolve and shift between geographical interests. Defamation in Australia is a tort of strict liability; and, absenting applicable defences, any participation in communication is sufficient to make that participant a publisher and a party to the defamation. The online environment stretches words across geographical and jurisdictional boundaries, but it also stretches and contorts concepts of fault and responsibility. Participatory digital cultural practices integrating users in the creation of cultural heritage simultaneously draw participants into transgressions, both cultural and legal, which are amplified by the medium. Questions of collective guilt, ‘shades’ of moral responsibility and disproportionality between blameworthiness and legal liability challenge laws formulated for the printing press but now deployed in the online environment. In this way the digitized participatory environment presents deep challenges to law and legal systems, which are chained to geography. This paper considers the concept of innocent publication in the context of the digitized participatory environment and the way in which the virtual experience is dissolving concepts of geographically defined jurisdictions. (shrink)

The paper deals with the problem of digital restitution of art to post-colonial and postdependency countries. A new model of digital restitution composed of two elements: creation of a digital copy with a NFT attached and creation of new property right in a physical and digital object has been proposed. A system of balances between the rights and duties based on the prior user concept has been developed.

This article considers current advances in tattooing that are challenging community-held views of authorship and ownership, and the need to address this tension. The key challenge is from AI-generated artworks being used as tattoo designs, but the authorial role of the tattooist is also challenged by body art projects such as tattoo collection. Legal clarity for tattooing is lacking, and in addressing this, this article advocates for an open, community-based form of shared copyright ownership and authorship for projects as tattoo (...) collecting, drawing on Dusollier’s and Mendis’ work. This article contributes to both copyright and cultural heritage legal scholarship, and to tattooing scholarship and the tattooing community. AI-generated art being tattooed on people has not been explored in the literature to date, and this article fills this gap. Furthermore, this article contributes a pilot study of the tattoo community’s views on AI-generated tattoos, which is currently lacking from the scholarly debate on AI-generated art. This article argues that the debate within the tattoo community about AI-generated art being used in tattoos needs to be addressed within the community through agreed extra-legal norms, which may well depart from how copyright law decides to approach AI-generated art globally. This article also asserts that AI should _not_ be regarded as the “author” of tattoo works in the traditional copyright sense, as only a human tattooist can draw from a number of cultural, textual, audiovisual and visual, cultural folklore, history and mythical references in creating their tattoo designs, as well as drawing on the client’s personal stories. This article explores the following: (i) an understanding of tattooing as an artform; (ii) tattoos in UK copyright law; (iii) an exploration of the authorial role of the tattooist within tattooing; (iv) the authorial role of the tattooist within tattoo collecting; (v) AI-generated tattoos—perspectives from the tattoo community, through a pilot study of YouTube videos and viewer comments about this; and (vi) a consideration of whether copyright legal reform is the solution for the tattooing community. (shrink)

This paper explores the disruptive impact of digitization on cultural heritage preservation, focusing on the challenges posed by intellectual property rights, access, and enforcement. It emphasizes the need to balance innovation and preservation in the digital landscape, addressing issues such as copyright complexities, the commodification of cultural knowledge, and the Western-centric bias in policy shaping. By fostering global cooperation, cultural sensitivity, and public awareness, we will aim at achieving an inclusive and sustainable approach to safeguarding our diverse cultural heritage in (...) the digital era. (shrink)

This paper addresses the relation between explicitation and translation expertise in the rendition of nominalisation and participles in the legal Qurʾānic verses specific to purification and prayer. It uses a corpus-based method: _The Qurʾānic Arabic Corpus_. The paper argues that most of the expert Qurʾān translators explicitate in rendering nominalisation and participles in the legal verses specific to purification and prayer into English in the said corpus. They explicitate in the form of both addition and specification with varying degrees as (...) the former is adopted twice as much as the latter. The paper claims that most explicitations specific to the rendition of nominalisation and participles in the legal Qurʾānic verses peculiar to purification and prayer in the corpus have been superfluous, albeit justifiable. This may confirm the relation between explicitation and translation expertise in _The Qurʾānic Arabic Corpus_ in the sense that although the meaning of nominalisation and/or participles is wholly translated into English, the Qurʾān translators still explicitate through addition or specification to further facilitate the comprehension process. This paper offers a baseline for examining explicitation exercised on nominalisation and participles in the legal Qurʾānic verses particular to purification and prayer, which may have implications for future studies conducted on the same topic in other similar legal contexts. (shrink)

In this article I call for an awareness of the mobile commons– the informal support that exists among migrating people, NGOs, and activists – in relation to the realization of family reunification. Taking its point of departure in a concrete case of family reunification for young unaccompanied children, the article seeks to expose how the traditional legal notion of the liberal subject fails to provide protection in the context of legal practice. I argue for using the vulnerable subject as a (...) starting point, in order to make more visible the context in which law operates and ensure protection even for the youngest children. (shrink)

Legislative writing, which is one of the key genres in the practice of law, has mostly been overlooked in pedagogic applications in English for Legal Communication (ELC), even though more than any other professional writing, it demonstrates very typical and distinctive use of linguistic and other semiotic resources, including some of the specific rhetorical conventions and constraints. However, it is surprising that despite its distinctive prominence in legal practice, it has never figured in English for Legal Communication programmes. It seems (...) to be the result of pedagogic convenience rather than curriculum need. In this paper, I would like to argue for the inclusion of legislative genres in English for Legal Communication curriculum design as input to teaching materials, to make it easier for learners to understand and interpret other forms of legal communication, such as cases, judgements, contracts, agreements, and even courtroom interaction. (shrink)

This paper argues that while regulatory frameworks in aged care authorise restraints to protect vulnerable persons living with dementia from harm, they also serve as normalising practices to control challenging monstrous Others. This argument emerges out of an observed unease in aged care discourse where older people living with dementia are described as ‘vulnerable’, while dementia behaviours are described as ‘challenging’. Using narrative analysis on a case study from the Final Report of the Australian Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality (...) and Safety (RCAC), this paper investigates how the RCAC (re)produced constructions of persons with dementia as ‘vulnerable monsters’. Drawing upon monstrous theory about ‘unruly and leaky’ bodies, extracts from the case study reveal how the RCAC repeated and reinforced monstrous constructions of dementia. Dementia behaviours, particularly ‘wandering’, were constructed through a dehumanising crisis frame that produced ‘challenging’ bodies and legitimised ‘last resort’ normalising practices, such as physical and chemical restraints. In failing to resist monstrous constructions of dementia behaviours, the RCAC accepted and authorised a regime of scaled responses leading to restrictive practices for control of challenging bodies in aged care. Although dementia care and restrictive practices received substantial attention in the RCAC, this paper reveals a missed opportunity for deeper review of institutionalised use of restraints that has relevance for ongoing reform of Australian aged care following conclusion of the RCAC. (shrink)

This research investigates methods of semantization of legal English vocabulary for teaching purposes. It includes several stages. First, the article describes methods and procedures of collecting and analyzing learners’ errors related to the use of vocabulary. The errors are classified and grouped in accordance with the lexical challenges they stem from. The findings show that the most frequent errors are caused by inter- and intralanguage interferences and related, primarily, to the use of synonyms, homonyms, paronyms, false cognates, collocations, lexis having (...) stylistic and culture-specific connotations. Further, it characterizes ways of vocabulary semantization addressing the students’ errors and focusing on the linguistic phenomena that cause them. The most effective methods of semantization targeting the challenges are divided into translational and non-translational ones. The former include direct translation and translation–interpretation. The majority of semantization techniques are characterized as non-translational. This type of semantization involves definitions, synonyms and antonyms, enumeration, identifying semantics by means of word-formation elements, semantic ties between hyponyms and hypernyms as well as those revealing words’ etymology. (shrink)

Though judges and lawyers encourage claimants to settle disputes out of courts, lawyers may struggle managing out-of-court dispute resolution processes. Some of the dispute management struggles are related to emotions of clients. One of the reasons why it may be difficult to manage a client’s emotions is because out-of-court disputes require a different communication skillset from lawyers. The following note features some advice for law students on how to incorporate compassionate communication methods in personal injury disputes. Personal injury disputes may (...) be emotionally challenging for clients. Such challenges may manifest in communication issues and prolonged suffering of clients. Yet, both students and academics may dismiss the importance of soft-skill development in due course of legal education. As lawyer-socialization institutions, law schools have a duty to foster skills that are necessary to successfully assist clients in emotionally challenging disputes. This contribution discusses the notion of human suffering and compassion-based counselling scholarship in relation to personal injury disputes. The paper advocates for normalizing emotions in personal injury disputes, and through testimonials of Michigan lawyers, presents real life examples of how lawyers can communicate compassionately with their clients. Law students can benefit from learning about real-life examples of communication patterns between lawyers and clients to have better conversations with their clients. (shrink)

Children’s and young persons’ rights have received increasing been focus in recent decades, due in a significant degree to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In Sweden, compulsory care in the social-services system is disputed, not least for the forceful measures that facility personnel have at their disposal to control children in certain conflict situations. The general aim of this article is to examine how the increased emphasis in Sweden on children’s rights is promoting resilience for children (...) and youth in youth compulsory secure-care settings. A more general question is whether the child-rights discourse leads in practice to increased resilience for children and youth in this setting, or even in general. The empirical material shows that children and young people’s perceptions of care and treatment are strongly linked to their interactions with staff and how the staff use restrictive measures. Applying Martha Fineman’s vulnerability theory in this context means that achieving resilience demands an analysis of the institutional settings in which children and young persons live their day-to-day lives, including their relationships in this setting. Comparing the legal possibilities of physical constraint with interviews of children and personnel reveals that relevant legislative frameworks and children’s-rights discourse should serve as a protection mechanism for children and youths, but in real life, these seem to have limited effect. (shrink)

Universal vulnerability provides an alternative to a rights-based and social contract model for state responsibility by contextualizing the individual and revealing the ways in which we are all inherently and dynamically dependent on society and others throughout the life-course. Beginning from the body as an ontological concept, vulnerability theory shows the fallacy of the current obsession in legal and political theory with rationality, individual liberty, and autonomy as measures for assessing social justice. It compels us to ask different questions and (...) emphasize different principles and values than current liberal legal modes of reasoning about state responsibility. (shrink)

This article sets out a new conception of ‘property as an asset of resilience’. Building on Fineman’s emphasis on ‘webs’ of resilience, and applying insights from Actor-Network Theory and Resilient Property Theory, we examine how the rhetorical claims asserted by owners and non-owners, individually and collectively, and the ways that law recognizes and endorses those claims, affect the production of property-as-resilience. Applying Fineman’s framework, we argue that the ‘embodiment’ and ‘embeddedness’ of human vulnerability is revealed by the necessary and inevitable (...) relationship we have with land, housing and place. Everyone—including homeless people—must ‘be’ somewhere (embodiment); however, it is our ability to access ‘assets of resilience’ through our social embeddedness in institutional structures and relationships that mitigates (or not) our experience and life opportunities. In this article we analyze the nature of real property as an asset of resilience, the consequences of exclusionary concepts of ownership for how resilience is allocated, and the implications for how we think and talk about ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’ in property theories and property law. We consider the roles that states perform in the allocation of property as an asset of resilience: both directly, through the protection and enforcement of private property rights and official narratives about the nature of private property; and indirectly, as owners leverage the hinterland of privilege extended to ‘ownership’ and owners to deepen their own networks of resilience. (shrink)

Muslims are a marginal minority in Poland, but research shows that they are often subject to negative perceptions and hostility from the majority. Orientalist stereotypes about Islam and the people associated with it are widespread and often reproduced in the media. Research from North America and the European Court of Human Rights suggests that such prejudices can affect the adjudication of cases involving Muslims. It may be presumed that Poland is no exception to that, and this assumption was the starting (...) point for our empirical study. To date, there have been no studies on the perception of Muslims and Islam in the Polish legal system. This article presents the results of a qualitative thematic analysis of 57 judicial opinions issued by the common courts in Poland and published online, in which Islam or being Muslim was mentioned. The cases were categorised and texts of the judicial opinions closely analysed (with computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software) to identify recurring themes. The findings of this first exploratory study show that stereotypical representations and the “‘Othering” of Muslims do indeed occur in Polish courts, with some judges repeating Orientalist tropes that have become normalised in Polish society. (shrink)

The article explores court forms as an interactive genre essential for legal-lay communication in civil and family proceedings: court forms elicit key information from predominantly lay users for the purposes of court administration and the judiciary. The information presented in court forms defines the agenda and communicative focus of the subsequent hearings and settlement negotiations, and in some instances even the path the proceedings would take. It is thus important to consider court forms in terms of their comprehensibility as well (...) as functionality for eliciting legally coherent narratives and facilitating efficient engagement of lay participants with the proceedings. The case study presented in the article draws on the combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to explore two versions of the court form most frequently used by self-represented parties in England and Wales, ‘Form C100: Apply for a court order to make arrangements for a child or resolve a dispute about their upbringing’. The comparison of the paper form and its redesigned online version identifies the improvements made as part of the digitisation process but also indicates communicative challenges which can prevent the lay person from presenting the relevant information. The discussion provides an opportunity to reflect on the role of language in online courts. (shrink)

The study analyses the readability and clarity of economic specialised texts on supplementary individual pensions. The research includes agreements on individual pension products available on the Polish market at the beginning of 2017. The level of comprehensibility of language has been assessed using the “Jasnopis” application, based, among others, on the FOG index, while the structure of the content of the agreements has been assessed by an expert linguist (the expert linguist is one of the authors of this and a (...) number of other publications on clear and understandable texts). In addition, one of the texts was subject to a survey, the so-called cloze text, which provided more accurate information about readability for a specific reader group. The results obtained allow the conclusion that the language of agreements on individual pension products is very difficult and their understanding requires higher education or expertise in the field of finance. (shrink)

The study is aimed to test the governing-law anchor in the comparative analysis of legal terminology to harmonize the clash of legal cultures in legal translation. It is considered as an adjustment to a juritraductological approach to legal translation which invites legal translators to merge the tools of jurilinguistics, comparative law and traductology in the comparative analysis of legal concepts before selecting a suitable translation solution (Monjean-Decaudin, in: Research methods in legal translation and interpreting, Routledge, 2019). Rather than transposing a (...) text from a source law system to a target law system, legal translators are believed to operate in the bi-semiotic environment of two legal cultures as navigators of their recipients toward understanding the legal concepts under the governing law of the document. To this end a comparative conceptual analysis, that correlates with the parametrization method (Matulewska in Stud Logic Gramm Rhetor 45:161–174, 2016), should be anchored in the analysis of the source law concepts (Šarčević in New Approach to Legal Translation, Kluwer Law International, The Hague, 2000). First, the componential and taxonomic analyses were used to identify conceptual markers/parameters of source concepts to serve as tertia comparationis for the subsequent search of their functional equivalents in the target legal culture. Source concepts and their functional equivalents were subsequently subject to a comparative componential analysis aimed to reveal a degree of their match based on which coinage operations were activated in selecting suitable translation strategies. We hypothesized that the change in the governing-law perspective would trigger changes in translation solutions. The governing-law-anchored process of comparative analysis was detailed and exemplified by the analysis of the conceptual field of Homicide in the Slovak law, English law, and the US Model Penal Code. (shrink)

The usage of metaphor in languages for specific purposes has been in the focus of interest of cognitive linguistics for years, especially after Lakoff and Johnson published their famous book “Metaphors We Live by” in 1980. Inspired by that book, the author strives to prove that metaphor was not only intensely present in the history of law but also that it pervades the language of contemporary legal theory and practice. Terms like _injury of law, the burden of evidence, soft laws, (...) hard laws,_ etc. are so often used by lawyers in their professional communication that they are hardly recognizable as metaphors. In the theoretical part, the terms _conceptual metaphor_ and _lexical metaphor_, as well as _the source domain_ and _the target domain of the metaphor_ are defined. Accordingly, conceptual metaphor and lexical metaphor are interpreted from the perspective of the language of law. As an introduction to the discussion on metaphoric terms in the field of law, a number of metaphors is presented and discussed from the point of view of legal history, as the metaphoric and other poetic expressions were recognized as the features of legalese back in the early seventeenth century. In the main part, the author presents and discusses the most common conceptual metaphors in connection with the terms _law, justice, court,_ and the types of metaphors typically used in specific branches of law as criminal law, company law, and contract law. The empirical part of the paper is focused on two research tasks. Firstly, metaphors occurring in selected Legal English textbooks are explored and discussed by using a qualitative and a quantitative approach, and secondly, metaphoric terms and phrases of the EU Law are excerpted from the Treaty Establishing the European Community (Consolidated version 2002), the main task being to establish the frequency of metaphors in this relatively young branch of law and the types of conceptual metaphors they belong to. In the closing part, conclusions on similarities and differences in the use of metaphor between two different types of legal texts are drawn with specific reference to the frequency, lexical structures, and typology of conceptual metaphors in the field of law. (shrink)

The effects of climate change and increasing environmental pollution have clearly shown the vulnerability of individuals, local communities, and the natural environment, even in the Western context. However, despite such unquestionable data, International Law is still struggling to find adequate, unambiguous, effective solutions to the issue. Even the ‘human right to a healthy environment’, recognised by the UN General Assembly in 2022, is permeated by an anthropocentric idea of the world, which prevents it from fully dealing with ecosystem issues so (...) as to protect any living and non-living being. The paper starts by exploring the historical relevance of the concept of limit and the lack of boundaries in contemporary society, aiming to show that new semantics are needed, in order to overcome contemporary extractivism. An analysis of international legislation and jurisprudence will investigate the role that the concept of ecosystem vulnerability might play in the implementation of both human rights and the rights of nature. (shrink)

Freedom of expression is a fundamental part of living in a free and open society and, above all, a basic need of every human being and a requirement to attain happiness. Its absence has relevant consequences, not only for individuals but also for the whole social community. This might explain why freedom of expression was, along with other freedoms (conscience and religion; thought, belief, opinion, including that of the press and other media of communication; peaceful assembly; and association), at the (...) core of liberal constitutionalism, and constitutes, since the Second World War, an essential element of constitutional democracies. In a democracy, people should be allowed to express themselves to others freely. The paper, which is divided into five sections, points out that states are obliged to protect the exercise of that freedom not only because its very purpose is the common good and welfare of society but also because it is a requirement of any constitutional democracy. Otherwise, when people cannot express themselves, perhaps out of fear (not from ‘war’ but from different kinds of social pressure or ‘violence’ exerted by some lobbies, mass media, or governmental policies that are at odds with respect for the plurality of opinions), vulnerability arises. This weakens not only those individuals that are not allowed to express their thoughts but also those who do not dare to do it – or even not to think for themselves – under certain environmental pressures (exerted by states, international organizations, social media, or financial groups, lobbies, etc.). In the end, the decline of freedom of expression makes most people more vulnerable and jeopardizes the whole democratic system. (shrink)

By unpacking some of the dichotomies inherent in the concepts of vulnerability and disability, the article problematises some of the current legal approaches to disability in Finland. It argues that where used to single out population groups or individuals due to their embodied characteristics, the vulnerability paradigm can be seen to create binaries both among the persons with disabilities, and between the “vulnerable” persons with disabilities and the perception of a rational, self-standing and autonomous human being. To mitigate such binaries, (...) the article explores an agency-centred discourse of vulnerability, one that recognises the co-existence of agency and vulnerability and sees agency as dynamic and responsive to the societal support structures that surround all of us. One of the central arguments of the article is that generalised approaches do, however, not suffice to make agency a reality for all persons with disabilities. Given the extensive diversity of intra-group variations between persons with disabilities, individualised solutions are needed for agency to be possible for all. To overcome objectification and de-agencification – and to enhance agency – this diversity of situations, needs and contexts of lived-in realities of individuals also needs to be expressly reflected in the legal language in addressing disability. (shrink)

By embracing the ontological view of vulnerability and stressing its social basis, the paper aims to clarify the role of vulnerability within human rights paradigm.Vulnerability is conceived of by the author as a heuristic notion, which works as a pillar for a general approach to some crucial challenges to human dignity. Both this heuristic notion and these challenges are regarded in the paper as hallmarks for the human rights paradigm.In order to ground this view, the coherence between “vulnerability turn” and (...) the rationale of human rights relies on a four-steps argument dealing with: (i) the denial of a necessary mismatch between the notion of vulnerability and the principle of autonomy; (ii) the appreciation of relation in human rights conceptualization; (iii) the complementarity between vulnerability, as a heuristic notion, and the principle of equality; (iv) the understanding of vulnerability as a “vehicle of empathy” not necessarily involving paternalist trends and therefore not in conflict with the empowerment purposes of human rights.The relevance of “vulnerability turn” in human rights paradigm is defended in the paper within a view of human rights as basic rights, i.e. as means to prevent or fight against those threats that seriously affect basic human needs. (shrink)

The paper explores the hypothesis that multinomials can act as authorship-based style distinguishing markers in legal communication. Specifically, the analysis focuses on identifying the quantitative distribution patterns of structural categories of multinomials as typical for two authorship categories and on their communicative function. The two authorship categories that are contrasted here are legal professionals/experts and lay people. The analysis is conducted in the corpus-based methodology with a custom-designed corpus of English, authentic texts found in the legal trade, in the domain (...) of company registration proceedings. The findings confirm that multinomials that are conventionally considered to be a feature of professional legal communication are also cognitively salient in lay communication. Further, the texts drafted by the two categories of authors are profiled by structurally distinct multinomials. Functionally, it has been demonstrated that the structurally distinct types of multinomials that are found quantitatively salient in the two authorship categories are used predominantly for specific stylistic and/or pragmatic functions. Stylistically, multinomials contribute to conventional and ritual patterns which are used to meet the formality standards that have evolved in specific legal professions where authority is of particular importance. Pragmatic factors which account for quantitative salience of specific, structurally profiled categories of multinomials involve mainly reduplication of multinomials that embody norm-related concepts, which is required on the ground of intertextuality and ensures the materialisation of legal effect. (shrink)

Electronic commercial transactions have become a vital part of digital economies around the world. However, the countries need to upgrade their policy frameworks and related legal provisions amid a fragile cyber security environment. The authentication of electronic signatures is a complex phenomenon that needs attention for authentication and recognition. This research presents a comparative analysis of the two countries Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. This study analyzes the related legal statutes to figure out differences and compatibility with reference to (...) their recognition and ability to execute safe electronic transactions in the minimum time. Two legislative enactments have been analyzed in this study that is Jordanian electronic transactions law of 2015 and the United Arab Emirates Electronic transactions and trust services law of 2021. The study concludes that UAE laws are better recognized to verify and authenticate the electronic-signature-based commercial transaction in comparison with the enactments of Jordan in terms of categorizing different levels of security of the electronic signatures and legal preventive measures in case of falsification of data, content, and signatures and breach of the trust. (shrink)

Epicurus holds, in _Key Doctrine_ 31, that what is just according to nature is a _súmbolon_ or sign of the interest there is in neither harming one another nor being harmed. Certain readings of this maxim equivocate this legal sign with other signs found in nature, thereby failing to give sufficient weight to the role of reciprocity in its production. Other readings simply import a legal sense from outside of Epicurean doctrine, thereby failing to explain what makes Epicurean _súmbola_ legal. (...) A final set of readings attempt to find a legal rule as a kind of innate concept or Kantian ‘scheme’. This article identifies new sources for understanding _súmbolon_, drawn principally but not exclusively from Aristotle’s _Eudemian Ethics_. This article offers an original argument that Epicurus adopts Aristotle’s’ image of the tally stick (_symbolon_) as a meeting of often divergent interests which constitutes something new and particularly valuable to the Epicurean: friendship. A theoretical argument is also advanced to support this reading which claims that one person’s reflection on a ‘divine image’ of the end (_telos_) is insufficient to constitute a _súmbolon_; rather real (as opposed to abstract or ideal) individual interests are filtered via the mechanism of the tally, that is via the meeting of two given individuals who together generate a sign (_symbolon_) of reciprocal interest in neither harming nor being harmed. (shrink)

The 2017 Riyadh Summit is one of the events that various media outlets densely covered. Drawing upon Van Dijk [ 53 ] Ideological Square, this study aims at identifying the in-group and out-group in ten pro-government Arab newspapers and investigating the discursive sub-strategies that were utilized in the representation of “us” and “them.” The findings reveal that most of the Arab newspapers tended to utilize a bundle of negative other-representation discursive sub-strategies to establish a dichotomy between “us” and “them” and (...) thus, construct “us” either directly or indirectly. It was found that negative lexicalization, distancing, and vagueness were the most frequently employed discursive sub-strategies in negative other-representation, while national self-glorification was the most frequently used discursive sub-strategies in positive self-representation. The study concludes by recommending other researchers to explore the same topic but in broadcast media, taking into account the prosodic aspects as well as the discourse itself. (shrink)

Many legal theorists and linguists have addressed the notion of legal language from different perspectives. Despite that, the definitions of legal language vary. Almost all of the approaches conclude that legal language entails several types of communication. Nevertheless, not all of these categories are sufficiently researched. Some types of legal communication seem to be neglected. This lack of interest might be rooted in the uncertainty of whether these texts or utterances even fall under the scope of the concept of legal (...) language. In order to avoid this superficiality in subsequent research, it is first necessary to come to a clear determination of which communicative acts can be considered a part of legal language and which cannot. Accordingly, in this search for the definition of legal language, we should not neglect the fact that language is executed in concrete communicative acts, and the only means to grasp the language is through communication. The aim of this article is therefore to clearly delineate the boundaries of this concept. Based on analysis of how the given term is currently defined, I draw out the common features and trace the characteristics in which they differ. Taking into account these findings, I propose a novel comprehensive demarcation of legal language. This concept argues that the ‘legal’ nature of language should be determined by the context and function of the particular statement or exchange, in connection with the role of participants in the communication. This means that a particular act may be considered a part of legal language not in accordance with a certain form or lexicon used, but mainly by extralinguistic circumstances in the context of which it is being performed. (shrink)

Sitting at the nexus of unchanging constitutional rights, constantly evolving social norms, and tensions between federal and state justice systems, defamation law in the US is exceedingly complex. In this work, I focus on a single conceptual and practical problem amidst this network: the fact-opinion distinction. This distinction—developed largely as a result of US Supreme Court decisions _Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc._ and _Milkovich v. Lorraine Journal Co._—states that, while opinions are protected under the First Amendment so long as they (...) do not imply “provably false” information, facts, if false, may always be actionable in a lawsuit for defamation. Thus, the judicial decision of whether an allegedly defamatory statement is fact or opinion is influential in determining whether a claim may move forward. In spite of the significance of this distinction, legal precedent and academic literature shows that there are no generally agreed upon characteristics to organize statements into these two categories. Using the framework of Appraisal Analysis (Martin and White, The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2005), I examine a corpus of previously adjudicated defamatory language to answer the question: _how does expression of stance differ between judicially-determined statements of opinion and fact in defamation cases?_ This analysis reveals that judicially-determined opinions express more markers of attitude and expanding engagement than their factual counterparts. Ultimately, I argue that this research may be directly applied to the analysis of allegedly defamatory language in the US, and, in being so applied, may play a role in adding robustness to existing analytical procedures regarding the distinction between fact and opinion in defamation law in the US. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis knows two things at least. First, that all human endeavour and all human failure is imbued with anxiety, and that, therefore, to diagnose human endeavour, or to diagnose failure, is to locate the nature and origin of anxiety. And second, that anxiety itself amplifies the need to “diagnose” human being, and human beings. Psychoanalysts, in other words, know that for them to be able to do the work of psychoanalysis, they need to be (cultural) anthropologists first. In this contribution (...) an attempt is made to sketch out the broad outlines, and the deep anthropological backdrop, of a cultural undercurrent which has come to dominate Western culture in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Building on Peter Sloterdijk’s work, and using the image of the ‘line of anxiety’ as a heuristic tool, we’ve named this cultural undercurrent radical bastardy, i.e. the aspiration to live as sovereign—absolutely sovereign-a life as possible. This cultural trend-which has a long history, and which many are now drawn to- is, however, shot through with anxiety. To live the life of an aspiring sovereign is to live a life in nagging anxiety. It is to live a life of unrelenting attempts to “diagnose” anything that even vaguely resembles law, or code, in order to avoid it, elude it, keep it at bay, or, if necessary, eradicate it. (shrink)

This paper investigates the phenomenon of judicial law-making in the practice of the highest courts dealing with criminal matters in Germany and Poland on the basis of 200 of their decisions. While German jurisprudence principally acknowledges the right of the judiciary to create new law, the Polish legal theory generally rejects this notion. Still, research indicates that, in practice, the differences in the frequency and intensity with which these courts pass creative rulings are not as substantial as the discrepancy in (...) the theoretical stance would suggest. Owing to circumstances, both the German Federal Court of Justice and the Polish Supreme Court are willing to create new legal norms, but the dimensions of judicial law-making presented by these bodies deviate from each other. In the research sample, the German Federal Court of Justice was more inclined to introduce legal institutions that were foreign to the statutes and rule against the will of the lawmaker explicitly stated in the preparatory works. On the other hand, the Polish Supreme Court used logical conclusions more often, but did not also refrain from passing rulings against the clear wording of the statutory law, and was just as willing to go beyond the wording of the law as was the German Federal Court of Justice. Notably, only the German apex court is willing to openly admit that it creates new legal norms, whereas the Polish Supreme Court does not concede in the reasons that its decisions are of a law-making nature, especially when it applies so-called “interpretation in the wider sense”—which is, in essence, a “concealed” way of creating new legal norms. (shrink)

Nirbhaya, Asifa, Manisha Valmiki, and the list of victims, (be it women, children or men) in India goes on. There is myriad of legislations enacted in the past to curb the offences, but the crimes in the society seem to be unstoppable. During the COVID time, in the lockdown too, the crimes continued to take place. There were several instances of domestic violence and rapes heard in news. Many instances of suicides were reported. It is really difficult to understand what (...) place in the country is safe for the existence and peaceful survival of any person? The question that arises is whether a victim who comes before the court is provided with the adequate relief? Has the Judiciary or the Parliament done something with this regard? Does the concept of compensatory jurisprudence exist in India? What more is required to be done to enhance the position of victims and rehabilitate them? The research article shall look into the concept of compensatory jurisprudence with respect to India and other nation states as well. There are prevailing enormous laws which discuss about the punishment to be given to the accused person guilty to have committed crime, but unfortunately, there is no specific law regarding the steps to be taken to rehabilitate a victim who has been the subject matter of any crime. The research paper shall deal with various aspects and try to analyse laws or rules, if any, existing with regard to the protection of victims in India or around the globe. It shall also try to look into the role that the States play in rehabilitating and compensating the sufferers and victims of various crimes. The article shall conclude with suggestions as to how the research gaps related to victim reparation be filled. (shrink)

The article presents the results of the analysis of international legal regulation of the protection of freedom of speech, the right to freedom of expression within the UN and the Council of Europe. A comparative analysis of the definition of the right to express views and beliefs in various international legal acts was made. The case law of the European Court of Human Rights in cases related to the exercise of the right to express one's views and beliefs on the (...) Internet was considered. The analysis of the legislation of foreign countries regulating the right to express views and beliefs online was carried out. The materials of the article are of practical value for scientists and practitioners dealing with the issues of legal regulation of freedom of speech, the right to express views and beliefs, for forecasting and planning scientific research, improving legislation, for higher education teachers in educational activities, as well as for all interested persons. (shrink)

This article seeks to investigate the role that a symbol—connected to a legal event and a collective trauma—has in the construction of a past imaginary. It begins with a theoretical reflection on the role of the symbol as proposed by Juri Lotman and the function of repetition in the consolidation of collective memory. It subsequently focuses on the semiotic resonance of one specific object: the bulletproof cabin of the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann, used during his trial in Jerusalem, in 1961. (...) I consider the ‘afterlives’ of this object, examining the different ‘remakes’ of Eichmann’s cabin in several mediatic and artistic contexts, focusing on the modalities that have anchored it to the post-1961 imaginary of the perpetrator and the legal consequences of his actions. To do so, the article proposes a typology of uses of the cabin, identifying the different nuances of its representation and how they encapsulate the thorny issues surrounding that infamous legal event. (shrink)

The present work discusses the complex nature of the term ‘gender’ in legal discourse, in the wake of the recent pushbacks that the 2011 Istanbul Convention has received from anti-feminist movements and nations that have not signed/ratified the document or have withdrawn from it. Though its original aim was to protect women’s rights, the debate has eventually surfaced deeply-rooted problems linked to gender-related vocabulary. For this reason, the study will analyse the use of the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ in the (...) 1995 UN Beijing Declaration, the 1998 Rome Statute, and the 2011 Istanbul Convention, from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. It aims to provide a critical comparison of the definitions, translations, and interpretations of the term ‘gender’, in an attempt to overcome some of the issues involved in the harmonisation of EU documentation, which could certainly help guarantee fundamental rights and convince more states to sign/ratify the Convention, or at least, not allow them to use issues not related to women’s rights to not accept the document. The interpretation of gender-related violence is still ‘in progress’, and the lack of harmonisation could eventually hinder fundamental human rights instead of helping the Istanbul Convention save lives. (shrink)

The relevance of the study lies in the fact that in the reforms of the system of compulsory enforcement of decisions stipulated the possibility of performing these functions by private enforcers. The purpose of the article is to consider problematic aspects of the legal status of a private enforcer as a participant of legal relations in the enforcement process. The results of the study contain generalizations on the analysis of the legal status of a private enforcer, proposals for amendments to (...) current legislation on private enforcers and the protection of the rights of the parties of enforcement proceedings. Finally, conclusions were formulated, which may be useful to practitioners of various legal professions such private enforcers, lawyers, judges, as well as citizens and legal persons, including those who are parties to the executive procedure. (shrink)

The paper examines selected aspects of the defence closing argument in a highly publicised criminal trial to illustrate the orchestration of various semiotic resources in legal persuasion and to explain their role in the creation of meaning. The study demonstrates that closing arguments are multimodal performances whose persuasiveness results from the combination of modes (speech, image, video, gaze, gesture, posture, proxemics) which contextualise and strengthen one another, rather than language alone. Drawing on earlier research into multimodality, courtroom rhetoric and proximity (...) in disciplinary genres, the analysis centres on the ways in which the defence counsel controls the rhetorical features of his narrative and constructs himself and the audience as people with similar understandings and goals. The study specifically demonstrates how the counsel constructs the proximity of commitment, the proximity of membership and the proximity of experience. It explores such facets of proximity as: organisation, argument structure, credibility, stance and engagement, and identifies key rhetorical strategies used to achieve the intended communicative effect. The analysis clearly shows that the persuasiveness of the counsel’s performance depends on the synchronisation of a range of meaning-making resources, which, if used in isolation, would result in a much less engaging argument. (shrink)

Recognition of legal personhood in contemporary international and domestic law is a matter of signs. Those signs identify the existence of the legal person: human animals, corporations and states. They also identify facets of that personhood that situate the signified entities within webs of rights and responsibilities. Entities that are not legal persons lack agency and are thus invisible. They may be acted on but, absent the personhood that is communicated through a range of indicia and shapes both legal and (...) popular understanding of powers and obligations, they lack standing in judicial fora. They are signified as entities that are the subjects of action by legal persons, for example exploitation through rights regarding natural resources or commodification of ‘wild’, companion and other non-human animals. They are also signified as members of a diverse class of non-persons such as ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’. This article explores the consequences of law’s signification of personhood and the natural world before asking whether we both should and could recognise domains such as specific rivers, forests or even Antarctica as a type of legal person. Recognition might acknowledge the salience of nature in the ontologies of colonised First Peoples. It might also underpin a global response to climate change as the existential crisis of the Anthropocene. In understanding law as a matter of signifiers and syntaxes the article cautions that ostensible recognition of some domains as persons has been aspirational rather than substantive, with observers misreading the sign as necessarily transforming power relationships. The article also cautions that personhood for nature or particular domains may be contrary to the self-determination of colonised First Peoples. (shrink)

This article aims to provide a semiotic analysis of environmental law and youth protests. More precisely, drawing on speech act theory this article regards both as types of communication and teases out the inherent voice and message, specifically with regard to the interests of future generations. The argument unfolds in three steps. First, the article looks into speaker and speech of environmental law and argues that it speaks, as legislation does, in the first-person plural voice of a ‘we’. Second, the (...) article examines a speech of Greta Thunberg through the lens of Stanley Cavell’s theory of passionate utterances. This interpretation will unlock the political stakes of Thunberg’s speech as she claims standing with those responsible for enacting environmental law. Finally, the consequences of this reading will be analysed by relating message and voice of environmental law. As youth protests question ordinary forms of political representation, new ways of safeguarding the interests of future generations are called upon. (shrink)

Today, data and intervening digital media provide critical lines of communication with our social and business connections. Even those we know personally will typically connect to us via digital means. As a consequence, data and the digital space add a third dimension to the individual: we are now mind, body and digitality. This essay considers how digitality affects outcomes for the individual by exploring the mechanisms of digital influence. By using Peirce’s theory of semiosis to explain the process of digital (...) translation, this essay demonstrates how digitality influences the development of the individual, undermines personal autonomy and changes the nature of legal personhood thereby providing points for future legal intervention. (shrink)

Unlike one-to-one threats, terrorist threat texts constitute a form of violence and a language crime that is committed in a complex context of public intimidation, and are communicated publicly and designed strategically to force desired sociopolitical changes [19]. Contributing to law enforcement and threat assessors’ fuller understanding of the discursive nature of threat texts in terrorism context, this paper examines how language is used dialogically to communicate threats and to construct both the purpose of threatened actions and the victims. The (...) paper uses a critical discourse analytic approach and takes a set of eleven digital threat texts made by two jihadists as a case study. It draws on van Dijk’s concept of ideology [64], the law enforcement-based taxonomy of threat types as reported by Napier and Mardigian [40], van Leeuwen’s model of social actor representation and discursive construction of purpose of social actions [69], and Martin and White’s Engagement system [34]. The analysis reveals victims specified and genericised, excluded and adversary. This linguistic construction is underpinned by a dichotomous conceptualisation of the social actors’ affiliations, positions, values, cultural activities, goals, and material and symbolic resources. The threats are delivered to the victims, agents acting on their behalf (e.g. security forces) or property associated with them (e.g. oil refinery), and are of two primary types—direct, and veiled. The former are predominant and serve inter alia to augment the public-intimidation impact of terrorist discourse. Threatened violence is of goal-, means- and/or effect-oriented social purposes, which suggest a categorisation of threats based on these purposes. The analysis reveals a dialectic, refutative nature of argumentation, and a discourse pregnant with heteroglossic utterances that contract (i) to close off and disalign with state officials’ contradictory voices, and (ii) to produce tension, providing clues to terrorists’ motivations and what constitutes the heart of political violence. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present some of the results of empirical research on the communication process at a trial conducted in Polish courts. These results will concern the participation of non-professional participants of a trial and the ways in which they deal with the communication process in the courtroom. The article presents the results of the analysis of the research material conducted in accordance with the detailed research questions and analytical categories. The analysis has especially shown that: (...) (1) the non-professional participants used some legal terminology, but the statements without legal terminology were also communicatively effective; (2) the level of activity of non-professional participants related to participation at the trial varied depending on what the activity concerned; the activity in asking questions to the presiding judges regarding legal issues and the course of the court proceedings appeared to be significant; (3) the non-professional participants’ had a real and significant problem with asking questions during the examination (the proper realization of this element of the trial); (4) the statements of the non-professional participants of a trial were very protective; they used many different “linguistic means of protection” (e.g., acts of supposition or acts of doubt) which are connected with the obligation to tell the truth, the prohibition of concealing the truth and giving false testimony during examination; (5) the non-professional participants of a trial reach for adequate argumentative acts, which are suitable for influencing the perception of specific events or persons, and they strengthen their statements by using appropriate linguistic means of persuasion. (shrink)

As part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many jurisdictions across the world introduced remote hearings as an alternative way of continuing to offer access to courts. This practice-based article discusses the report prepared by the author for a judicial review case which revolved around the claim that in immigration settings the quality of interpreting conducted in fully online hearings is inferior to interpreting in face-to-face hearings. In the absence of pre-existing research comparing the impact of the physical and (...) fully online settings on interpreting, the author’s expert witness report explored linguistic principles governing conversation and turn-taking management, power relations and narrativisation and discursive practices in online and physical settings to illustrate communicative advantages and disadvantages of each environment. The article draws on the investigations conducted for the expert witness report and pursues the following aims: (1) reflect on the role of linguistic expertise required for the case; (2) detail the conclusions drawn and recommendations endorsed in the report; (3) discuss the importance of effective communication in immigration settings; (4) challenge common misconceptions in relation to how narratives are elicited, shared and perceived; (5) explore safeguarding strategies for enhancing discursive practices in fully remote hearings in order to improve non-native speakers’ access to justice. (shrink)

There are certain standards of legal interpretation. Interpretive directives are heterogeneous—both in terms of the issues they address and of the form. Not all authors consider the canons of interpretation to be norms like any other ones. Moreover, some claim that the term “incorrect interpretation” refers only to an arbitrarily chosen concept. I intend to investigate whether, despite the objections raised, interpretative directives can be said to have the status of legal norms. I wonder whether the so-called law of interpretation (...) (LoI), can provide a normative key to assess the correctness of the interpretation of legal texts. Text raises important questions concerning LoI. Firstly, the question of the status of interpretative directives and the problem of their defeasibility. Second, it refers to the problem of compliance with interpretative directives and the consequences of their violation, drawing attention to the two contexts of legal interpretation (the context of discovery and justification) and to the fact that canons of interpretation can constitute a standard for the correctness of the interpretative procedure and for its result. Third, this paper refers to the problem of vagueness of interpretative directives, analysing the advantages of maintaining it to a certain extent, as well as the possibilities of reducing it in the rest. The fourth issue analysed is the multiplicity of canons and the lack of a defined hierarchy of them. I conclude by pointing out that LoI should provide a model by which to assess the correctness of an interpretation. (shrink)

The article analyzes the impact of modern digital technologies used in the information society on democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in general. Both positive and negative aspects of such impact are considered. The importance of this topic is due to the need for further deepening of scientific knowledge related to the development of the rule of law in the information society and insufficient research from the legal point of view of current theoretical problems of the rule of (...) law in the digital era. The purpose of this article is to study the rule of law as a principle of the modern state of the 21st century and to study the problems in matters of human rights that have arisen with the development of modern digital technologies. The study of this issue is quite relevant, considering the conclusions, made as a result of our work, can be taken into account in further theoretical developments of international and national human rights protection aimed at improving the effectiveness of human rights judicial protection and improving current legislation. (shrink)

The article defines the research field of a semiotically oriented philosophy of digital communication. It lays out its methodological perspective, pointing out how the fake has always been at the center of semiotic research. It traces the origin of deepfakes back to the conception of GANs, whose essential semiotic workings it expounds on. It enucleates the specificities of the digital fake, especially in the production of artificial faces. It reviews the deepfake phenomenon, enunciating its most recent statistics, prevalent areas of (...) application, risks, and opportunities. It surveys the most current literature. It concludes by emphasizing the novelty of a situation in which the fake, in human societies and cultures, is produced mostly by machines. It stresses the desirability for a semiotic and interdisciplinary study of these productions. (shrink)

Law 49/2018, of August 14, created the Portuguese legal regime of the assisted decision-making (capacity), thus eliminating the legal institutes of interdiction and disqualification, provided for in the Civil Code (CC). The aim of this legal regime was to embed a new vision of disability based on a model of rights, that grants people with disabilities an independent and autonomous life and reflects the acceptance of the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) guidelines. This paper intends (...) to discuss the ‘new’ Portuguese legal system regarding the legal capacity of persons with disabilities and its role in valuing the expression of the real will of people with disabilities. (shrink)

The need for the axiological determinants of cognition of law to be theoretically justified as a constituent of legal progress that includes the humanization of law makes the problem under the study relevant. The purpose of this article is to distinguish the value determinants of cognition of law. The main methodological approaches used in the study are axiological and anthropological approaches, which allow us to consider law as a valuable constituent of human life, inextricably linked with the human personality. The (...) article reveals that the modern understanding of the term “law” is characterized by axiological and anthropological approaches to its cognition; founds out that the human legal value has an integral-synthesizing character to all other values and, as a result, is embodied in the absolute legal value and inherent worth; establishes that the human dimension of law has become the result and, at the same time, the source of value-legal human understanding, which indicates the value of law and its axiological characteristics. (shrink)

Graphic justice and the law of aesthetics have in very recent years successfully brought law, aesthetics and comics scholarship into the same space. The culture of copyright infringement within comics (including in the Marvel, DC, and Disney universes) has been extensively in the literature by scholars including Saval. How copyright law is portrayed within the graphic novels and comics themselves is the focus (and contribution of) this article. This article will explore several comics and graphic novels, as well as included (...) this author’s reflections of portraying copyright visually within zines for public dissemination. Throughout this article, the discourses of ghosts and spectres that are interwoven with copyright law and haunt the texts will be seen, as will the discourses of oppression and warfare that are involved for anyone seeking to make use of copyright works. As Gómez Romero and Dahlman note, comics offer “an alternative legal discourse” and we can see these alternative legal discourses through their aesthetic graphic form. This article will consider: the aesthetic portrayal of copyright law in A Gift for a Ghost and Josie and the Pussycats No. 6; as well as Bound by Law, Theft! A History of Music, and Pictures within Pictures. These comics and graphic novels have been chosen as they aesthetically portray copyright law and copyright infringement (referred to in some of the comics as “plagiarism”), and others aesthetically portray the public domain and fair use. In viewing these aesthetic manifestation of copyright law, the reader understands the limiting nature of copyright on creative freedoms, and that copyright law’s power is absolute. This article will explore the following: (i) copyright’s aesthetic portrayals and the impact of this; (ii) comics haunted by copyright law, considering A Gift for A Ghost and Josie and the Pussycats; (iii) comics about the necessity of the public domain and fair use, considering Bound by Law, Theft! A History of Music, and Pictures within Pictures; and (iv) self-reflections on portraying copyright aesthetically in publicly disseminated research zines. This article has not set out to determine that certain visual aesthetic portrayals are “correct” or “better”, but rather to explore how legal discourses and narratives about copyright law are circulated through the comics medium. These visual depictions hold considerable weight, and it is striking to see similar narratives used across a range of comics works, with different intended audiences. What is clear is that the visual depiction of copyright law enables a greater ability to convey the multiple copyright law discourses that can be felt at once, and also to highlight that some of these discourses are contradictory to one another. (shrink)

Albert Camus’ reflection in _The Myth of Sisyphus_ presents the absurd, the intrusion of the meaningless and irrational universe into the order and future focus of modern life. Central to Camus’ reading of Sisyphus and his dammed eternal labour, was time. Camus clearly saw that modernity and modern life was predicated on tensions in time. Moderns perceived, and lived, in the timescale of past-present-future. A commitment to chronology that promised an allusion of meaning within a world of essential meaninglessness. Modern (...) law, the law forged by the structural violence of positivism and sovereignty, shared this commitment to time. However, transitions to the digital are presenting different relationships of law and time. Emergent digital legality manifests a Sisyphean closed loop of repeat, return and enclosure, past and future become a blurred undistinguished present. The modern terror of mundane life that Camus tried to recast, seems intensified and totalised in the digital. However, rather than the possibility of the joy of the absurd, there is something else. Sisyphus, Camus imaged, had weathered to look like his rock, but he never merges with it. But in the unfolding of the digital and its legality, the secure subjectivity that Camus exalted is less then certain. This might not be bad. (shrink)

Existing theoretical literature on justice, law, and community typically treats them as ideas studying them through an analytical and rational approach. In this article, I propose to investigate these concepts through aesthetic experience as an attempt to both sharpen our imagination of such concepts and demonstrate they are inseparable. I do this by painstakingly examining the movies Shoplifters by Kore-eda and The House That Jack Built by Von Trier. Rather than focusing on thematic analysis, I claim and show that film (...) form is crucial for aesthetic and affective experience. Furthermore, and against the conventional view, I argue that both movies articulate a spatialized vision of justice defined by its materiality. Together these aspects help us to keep (re)imagining law, justice, and community, and grasp better their worldmaking properties and powers. (shrink)

This article identifies the principal signs forming the language of investment law and arbitration, isolating for each of them its signifier and its signified in light of how such signs are used by arbitrators, practitioners and scholars. In light of this analysis, investment arbitration is assessed from a semiotic standpoint in order to verify whether it is possible, under this perspective, to consider international investment law as a multilateralised branch of international law, with a common language, customs and rules rightly (...) referred to by international arbitral tribunals, or if the term “international investment law” is merely a conventional expression that simply groups together a plurality of micro-systems with no significant link among each other to justify the arbitrators' establishment of a de facto system of precedent and the constant reference to a non-existent body of international law rules on foreign investment. (shrink)

Epicurus holds, in Key Doctrine 31, that what is just according to nature is a súmbolon or sign of the interest there is in neither harming one another nor being harmed. Certain readings of this maxim equivocate this legal sign with other signs found in nature, thereby failing to give sufficient weight to the role of reciprocity in its production. Other readings simply import a legal sense from outside of Epicurean doctrine, thereby failing to explain what makes Epicurean súmbola legal. (...) A final set of readings attempt to find a legal rule as a kind of innate concept or Kantian ‘scheme’. This article identifies new sources for understanding súmbolon, drawn principally but not exclusively from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics. This article offers an original argument that Epicurus adopts Aristotle’s’ image of the tally stick (symbolon) as a meeting of often divergent interests which constitutes something new and particularly valuable to the Epicurean: friendship. A theoretical argument is also advanced to support this reading which claims that one person’s reflection on a ‘divine image’ of the end (telos) is insufficient to constitute a súmbolon; rather real (as opposed to abstract or ideal) individual interests are filtered via the mechanism of the tally, that is via the meeting of two given individuals who together generate a sign (symbolon) of reciprocal interest in neither harming nor being harmed. (shrink)

Epicurus holds, in Key Doctrine 31, that what is just according to nature is a súmbolon or sign of the interest there is in neither harming one another nor being harmed. Certain readings of this maxim equivocate this legal sign with other signs found in nature, thereby failing to give sufficient weight to the role of reciprocity in its production. Other readings simply import a legal sense from outside of Epicurean doctrine, thereby failing to explain what makes Epicurean súmbola legal. (...) A final set of readings attempt to find a legal rule as a kind of innate concept or Kantian ‘scheme’. This article identifies new sources for understanding súmbolon, drawn principally but not exclusively from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics. This article offers an original argument that Epicurus adopts Aristotle’s’ image of the tally stick (symbolon) as a meeting of often divergent interests which constitutes something new and particularly valuable to the Epicurean: friendship. A theoretical argument is also advanced to support this reading which claims that one person’s reflection on a ‘divine image’ of the end (telos) is insufficient to constitute a súmbolon; rather real (as opposed to abstract or ideal) individual interests are filtered via the mechanism of the tally, that is via the meeting of two given individuals who together generate a sign (symbolon) of reciprocal interest in neither harming nor being harmed. (shrink)