This paper shows how Peirce's semeiotic could be turned into a powerful science. The New Science of Semiotics provides not only a new paradigm and an empirical justification for all these applications, but also a rational and systematic procedure for carrying them out as well. Thus the New Science of Semiotics transforms the philosophy of law into the science of legal scholarship, the discipline that I call jurisology.

Anthropocene jurisprudence amounts to a legal attitude that posits human beings as the ultimate subject to which the legal ontology, epistemology, and language serve. This attitude inevitably leads to exceptionalism not only in terminology but also in the impact which legal verdicts incur, especially on the natural environment and species. In this paper, we make a coupled reading of jurisprudence and environmental science while suggesting a post-Anthropocene model of law which can be made philosophically consistent by appropriating a new theory (...) of human as a 'biocultural creature' to outgrow the attitude of exceptionalism in law. In doing so, we take recourse of dynamic systems and complexity theory for a law to account for the ontology, epistemology and linguistics of post-Anthropocene jurisprudence. (shrink)

IRBs and REBs use specialized language. A process of definition and re-definition of the situation occurs. That process of interpretation can usefully be considered from the perspective of interpretive social science models involving Symbolic Interaction, Semiotics and Hermeneutics. Seven examples are provided to flesh out the nuances of contextual decision making and the “casuistic” aspects of a balanced approach to complex problems. While many decisions are relatively unproblematic and can follow a template, it is not possible simply to apply a (...) fixed and mechanical approach. Hence, a socialization process occurs in which committee members must learn the actual application of the rules as opposed to the formal requirements. A “tightrope” between overly rigid and overly lax interpretations must be crossed and the more we understand the process of semiosis and the semiotic context the more likely it will be that truly ethical decisions will be “accomplished.” The lack of adequate survey data makes it all the more important to have good theoretical understanding of process. (shrink)

From a pre-publication review by the late Austrian economist, Don Lavoie, of George Mason University: -/- "The book's radical re-interpretation of property and contract is, I think, among the most powerful critiques of mainstream economics ever developed. It undermines the neoclassical way of thinking about property by articulating a theory of inalienable rights, and constructs out of this perspective a "labor theory of property" which is as different from Marx's labor theory of value as it is from neoclassicism. It traces (...) roots of such ideas in some fascinating and largely forgotten strands of the history of economics. It draws attention to the question of "responsibility" which neoclassicism has utterly lost sight of. It is startlingly fresh in its overall approach, and unusually well written in its presentation. ... It constitutes a better case for its economic democracy viewpoint than anything else in the literature." . (shrink)