Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The linguistic essence of legal text is in itself a respected theoretical topic in jurisprudence. At the same time, the methodology of its reading, which is the main, namely analytical function of applied jurisprudence, directly depends on how the language of positive law is understood. Both of these seldom emerge as the object of the Russian scholarly research. As a result, the domestic doctrine sees little competition between theories and lack of relevant discussion on this issue. Meanwhile, there are hardly any other are-as of legal knowledge where saving on theory would be so detrimental to practice. While experience-based skills, when applied to most sectoral problems, may com-monly conceal doctrinal illegibility in simple cases and provide an acceptable level of law enforcement, the language of dogma, with lack of attempts of its compre-hension, causes a direct effect on justice and legal understanding. In this article, which has become a revised “recension” of the work created in 2011 - 2012, the author offers his understanding of the nature of a legal text. He also identifies its essential properties, referred to as axiomaticity, verification au-tonomy, unambiguous intelligibility. In the course of this study he discusses state-ments that form legal rules in terms of “signified” and “signifier”, the concepts in-troduced into linguistics by F. de Saussure. The practical results of this theory are, firstly, the principle of construing the Signifier which the author calls “the formula of logical certainty”, and secondly, defined by this formula, the hierarchy of pat-terns to signify a legal text, or, to put it another way, of methods to verify judg-ments about the dogma.
Source: Legal Linguistics
Author: Vladimir Volfson
Institution: North-West Institute of Management
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4409355998