Symbols in Law

Although interpretation in legal discourse and practice could be restricted to the level of direct meaning, in practice it often leads to indirect meaning. If it appears that signs (linguistic or other), acts (for example, rituals), spaces, or images (including architecture) stand for something beyond their immediate, direct meaning, then they acquire symbolic potential. In legal texts, for example, the uses of metonymy, metaphor, and allegory often betray symbolic import. The symbolic meaning of the use of a phrase such as green belt land in environmental law and jurisprudence, for example, stretches beyond the mere denotation of the dominant color in a particular area. As it bears a visual and sensual image, the phrase may betray and [Page 1449]aesthetically communicate the more or less melancholy need, felt by some, to defend a certain, perhaps idealized way of life, rural and traditional or Arcadian, as it is assumed to once have been, in the “green and pleasant land” of yore. The phrase legal texts in this entry covers textual signs, acts, spaces, and images in law (also broadly meaning jurisprudence). The black and white gowns of barristers and other legal personnel, for example, may betray much more than a particular dress code. As some have argued, black and white dress may well be a remnant of an early modern aesthetic taste of a bygone elite, who desired to distinguish themselves culturally from others by demonstrating or suggesting moral restraint. However, such gowns may later have come to symbolize the impassive impersonality and neutrality to which members of the judiciary often aspire.

As law and jurisprudence are spheres where the circulation of signs tends to be couched in universalistic, or at least in hegemonic aspiration and logic, legal symbols, or more generally, signs, acts, spaces, and imagery in law, almost invariably point to indirect meaning. They will often lead interpretation to meanings beyond the direct meaning of their immediate forms and shapes. Symbols in law, along with their interpretation—in short, legal symbolism—is characterized, then, by the existential need for law to connect signs, acts, spaces, and images generated in particular contexts with a legal order that is often alleged to be universal, and vice versa. The production, circulation, reception, and interpretation of symbols in law thus emerges and unfolds in this space between the particular and the universal. This production, circulation, reception, and interpretation of symbols in law can be part of consciously and deliberately planned strategies or tactical maneuvers. To a certain extent, however, legal symbolism also tends to be the result (often subconsciously so) of cultural taste and sensual desire, and in most cases, it will prove to be impossible to trace a firm dividing line between planned strategy and sensual or aesthetic attraction.