Page 139 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

130 Geoffrey Sykes

mathematical processes, and the relevance of his three main sign categories to
contemporary legal technology and media. The concepts and imagery of legal
theory, involving tools and artefacts of pragmatic reasoning, are re-configured
by Kevelson, as she mixes allusions to aesthetics and science alongside legal
discourse [1989 : pp. 193-210]. Case studies in property and international law
are undertaken where such concepts can be ―adapted for the service of lawyers
and their clients".
Most importantly, the ―paradoxical structures‖ of law are addressed, that
are simultaneously abstract and actual, in terms of Peirce‘s categories of Firsts
(abstract/diagrammatic) and Seconds (factual/actual). She provides valuable
systemic discussion about Peirce‘s proto media ‗tools of reasoning or
existential graphs‘, as part of a reconceptualisation of legal media that
addresses reasoning as a basic function of media processes, along with
representation. She adopts Peirce‘s extended understanding of the iconic and
semiotic nature of diagrams, in order to fully embrace the non linear and non
representational imagery now common on the Internet and in multi-media
applications. Kevelson indeed anticipates more recent theories on the nature of
diagrams, as a media and mathematical form, in authors such as Stjernfelt. She
anticipates and addressesthe need for an interdisciplinary conception of
mathematics, media and law, as a profoundly important, quite essential and
largely undiscovered resource for ongoing legal theory and practice.
Her eloquent presentation of the ―semiotic structure of community-as-
inter-relationship‖ provides admirable and sustained testimony, in applied
legal studies, to Peirce‘s ―basic semiotic model of practical experience‖
[1987]. In confident paraphrastic interpretation, about the ―semiotic structure
of community-as-inter-relationship‖, about how ―a community from a
semiotics point of view refers to a system of interrelations,― she highlights and
celebrates Peirce‘s Thirdness.
Her argument for Peirce‘s own, intentional ―breakthrough‖ in legal theory
and semiotics can be seen as over-argued, yet nevertheless as an important
conceptual basis for a radical realist sociology and legal epistemology based
on Peirce‘s thinking, built as it was on re-conceived scientific and logical
methods. Around a contestable historical position, she manifests an
intriguingly contemporary interdisciplinary basis, involving aesthetics, law,
mathematics and science, all of which have yet to achieve ―a standard meaning
which is used in a standard way in discussions.‖ Such pursuits are ―like any
viable and rapidly changing idea - like any actual phenomenon in flux - that
has not been drafted and accepted as authoritatively drafted, as a technical
legal term may be so defined and drafted.‖ [1987].