INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW-REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SEMIOTIQUE JURIDIQUE最新文献

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.

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.

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.

Digital transformation incorporates new technology into all elements of business and will require the modification of old business models. Similarly, artificial intelligence (AI) is a relatively new disruptive technology with the potential to impact industry and society substantially. Cognitive techniques imitating human behaviour and thought have resulted in advanced analytical models that assist businesses in increasing sales and improving customer engagement, operational efficiency, and service quality by producing new relevant from existing data. These decision-making models are based on descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics. A legislative framework that oversees all digital development uniformly across countries and facilitates a fully regulated digital transformation process is required. However, this regulatory system must not hinder the digital revolution. This study shows that AI and digital transformation will be integrated into various applications and thus used extensively. Nonetheless, the implementation must be carried out in conformity with both standard regulations and the new realities.

COVID-19 has struck the world in an unprecedented way. Countries quickly tried to counter the rapid spread of the virus by imposing strict measures and national lockdowns. At the same time, some governments took advantage of the pandemic to besmirch their opponents. We utilize van Dijk (J Polit Ideol 11(2):115-140 2006) critical discourse analysis model to investigate how newspaper headlines reacted to COVID-19 from through ideological lenses. Results show that while the US implied that China is the origin of the virus, headlines in Arab newspapers showed that Saudi Arabia blamed travel to Iran for the early increases of COVID-19 cases.

This article aims to contribute to scholarship regarding the critique of rights through the examination of the role of rights discourse in the furtherance of what is generally termed 'community organising'-in particular, tenant organising-in the social and political context of neoliberalism. Conceptions of neoliberalism advanced in the work of David Harvey, Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, and Bonnie Honig are synthesised to explicate the material and discursive role of law in the maintenance and furtherance of the neoliberal project. The article assesses the left-legal critique of rights presented primarily through the Critical Legal Studies Movement alongside the role of legal practice and legal discourse in countering neoliberalism. The article argues that rights claims concerning collective organisation, such as those commonly afforded to workers and trade unions, present a unique exception to the left-legal critique of rights in providing the means by which oppressive social relations may not only be remedies, but overcome. The works of Chantal Mouffe and of Roberto Unger are instructive in this regard and are placed in conversation with theories of community and labour organising. The article concludes by sketching the application of this conception of organising rights to the problem of housing and tenants' rights under neoliberalism.

In this essay both the facts/values and facticity/normativity divides are considered from the perspective of global semiotics and with specific regard to the relationships between legal meaning and spatial scope of law's experience. Through an examination of the inner and genetic projective significance of categorization, I will analyze the semantic dynamics of the descriptive parts comprising legal sentences in order to show the intermingling of factual and axiological/teleological categorizations in the unfolding of legal experience. Subsequently, I will emphasize the translational and enactive cognitive disposition underlying the construction of the second premise of the so-called judiciary syllogism and thereby the untenability of the idea that 'law makes its facts.' Hence, I will try to bring to the fore the cultural pre-assumptions encapsulated in the positivistic and therefore also formalistic or analytical approaches to legal experience and the loss of their inner consistency when legal experience confronts the phases and major changes of global semiotics. Finally, I will strive to relativize the opposition between the positivist and non-positivistic theories of law in view of an understanding of legal experience focused not only, or at least not primarily, on what 'law is' but also on 'how' it unwinds through, and in spite of, environmental and semantic transformations.

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.

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.

The article examines the merits of both human rights and citizenship as systems to protect vulnerable individuals. The idea of vulnerability is presented as a more reliable concept than the dignity of the individual in comparative research. The body is basic to vulnerability.