Robert W. Benson

The Semiotic Web of the Law

As I read this I was astonished by the semiotic intuition of the protesters, by the way they simultaneously wove together subtle signs from American legal, political and pop culture to give Justice O’Connor’s texts new meaning. Their play on the near-homonyms “Sandra Day” and “Sandra Dee” was particularly astute. Sandra Dee, for those of you who make it a point not to store the trivia of pop culture in your memories, was a blonde movie star of the ’50s known for her role as the original “Gidget,” a naive character who hung out at the beach and adored the boys who exploited her while they pretended to teach her how to ride a surfboard.3 A decade later, her innocence was satirized in the musical Grease by a chorus of street-wise young females chiding, “Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee, lousy with virginity.” 4Thus was the first female Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court reduced to the level of a Malibu surfer groupie. And thus did the protesters produce a new meaning for Justice O’Connor’s judicial opinions: namely, if I may offer a bowdlerized version, that her opinions represent naive, old-fashioned submission to male dominance, here in the form of the aggressive Rehnquist.

How Judges Fool Themselves

This is a paper about a metaphorical sacred cow — the claim that judges find the law rather than make it — and I’d like to start by telling a story of authentic sacred cows which presents the problem rather crisply.

Obligations II: The Semiotics of International Law: Interpretation of the ABMTreaty

A post-structuralist, semiotic theory of legal interpretation shows that it explains how statutes, constitutions, and judicial opinions get their meanings. This theory is applied to texts of international law, illustrated with outlines of the 1988 U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The theory rejects a legal positivism, and also rejects linguistic structuralism with which Saussure’s descendants stirred so much excitement in past years. Semiotics tends to be static, mechanical systems-based, and claims to universal structures of the human mind which either do not exist at all, or are so deep and minimal that they have only feeble influence on the cultural superstructure. Structural legal semiotics becomes merely a neo-positivist exercise of analyzing law as an autonomous system of coded norms, a pragmatic account of legal interpretation, which starts with the notion that language and legal meaning are cultural artifacts produced in time and space through specific social institutions.