Bernard Jackson

The modern conception of the ``Rule of Law'' entails government bylaw not men, and takes law to consist in rules known in advance. Thislatter characteristic assumes that, for the most part, the meaningof such rules is unproblematic (Hart's ``core of settled meaning''), this usually being understood as a function of ``literal meaning''.A quite different model exists in the Bible: the early rules display``oral residue'', and their meaning, I argue, is constructed in``narrative'' rather than ``semantic'' terms: instead of asking:``what situations do the words of this rule cover?'', we shouldinquire: ``what typical situations do the words of this rule evoke?''.Moreover, courtroom adjudication was not the norm, and its originalform was not based upon the application of written rules but ratherupon judicial discretion taken to have been divinely inspired. Isuggest that modern jurisprudence still retains traces of such earlierconceptions, in its account of modern law: despite their differences, both Hart and Fuller make use of narrative constructions of meaning,and Kelsen ultimately prefers the authority of the judge to the correctness of the rule he purports to apply.

This response to the articles of Luzzati and Broekman (in this issue)addresses principally the character of early rabbinic legalinterpretation, as viewed by the Rabbis themselves. It considers, withexamples, their concept of ``simple meaning'' (peshat), and itsplace within their overall hermeneutic system and its theologicalpresuppositions. The second section responds more briefly to thetheoretical critiques of Luzzati and Broekman, stressing that (myversion of) semiotics is descriptive rather than normative; resists thereduction of textual meaning to interpretation; and refuses to equatedecision-making with justification. I suggest that traces of traditionaltheological positions may be discerned in the normativist positions ofmy interlocutors.

Later reprinted by Deborah Charles Publications (and not available from Amazon), this book expounds and comments on the application of Greimasian semiotics to a legal text, as found in the article by Greimas and Landowski in Greimas, Sémiotique et Sciences Sociales (1976), compares this with the semiotic presuppositions of Hart, Dworkin, MacCormick and Kelsen, and offers my own analysis of the implications of such semiotic analysis for legal theory, including some more recent radical non-positivist accounts.

This account of civil liability for animals in a range of ancient, mediaeval and modern legal systems (based on a series of studies conducted early in my career: (s.1)) uses semiotic analysis to supplement the insights of conventional legal history, thus balancing diachronic and synchronic approaches. It reinforces the conventional historical sensitivity to anachronism in two respects: (1) (logical) inference of underlying values from concrete rules (rather than attending to literary features of the text) manifests cognitive anachronism, an issue manifest in biblical scholarship’s discussion of the stoning of the homicidal ox in Exod. 21:28 (s.2); (2) the application of modern notions of literal (rather than narrative) meaning not only manifests a semiotic anachronism but here also obscures the institutional origins of many of the rules in a system heavily reliant on self-help and informal settlement.

This article is partly an exercise in academic autobiography, seeking to make sense of the different ways in which I have applied semiotics to secular law on the one hand, Jewish law on the other. The very fact that it can be applied to both shows that its claims are methodological. But it also indicates a possible reformulation of the semiotic issues in philosophical terms: we may view the relationship between the semantic and pragmatic levels in terms of the relationship/balance between certainty/truth (the semantic level) on the one hand and trust (the pragmatic level) on the other. What may distinguish the secular and religious systems is the manner in the issue of trust is be ideologically concealed.