Page 153 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

144 Geoffrey Sykes

basis for inquiry is not a thing, but is a relationship between related functions‖
[Kevelson, 1987] – and diffusion of innovation in specialised legal discourse
and inquiry [Kevelson, 1998, pp. 152-164, 182-192] was her major concern.
Kevelson‘s own examples transform the focus of legal realist on
professional behaviour, to which she brings almost a futurist creative, positive
evaluation. Her comparison of the corporate lawyers as artists or experimental
scientists, seems to idealise and glamorise, as much as uncritically normalise,
their routine activities, generalised behaviour and skills. ―A community is
therefore, a semiotically, coherent organisation purposefully structured and
bound by reference to commonly-held leading principles or value norms. Such
norms are those motifs and structures which can be said to characterise a
culture as a whole and to distinguish it from other cultures.‖ [Kevelson, 1987,
p. 140].
Her concern is with the iconic and ―indexical prototypes‖ and
―prefigurement of actions‖, that ―semiotically‖ structure social and cultural
organisation, against which the abstract rhetoric of formal law utterances can
be evaluated. ―Semiotics is constructed on prototypes of Exchange, of
Dialogue, of Community‖ [Kevelson, 1987, p. 250]. Peirce, Kevelson argues,
seeks ―free and open systems of thought, in free social
organisations‖[Kevelson, 1987]. Peirce spoke of an ―active law‖, which can be
compared to Kevelson‘s ―creative law‖, as ―efficient reasonableness, or in
other words as truly reasonable reasonableness. Reasonable reasonableness is
Thirdness as Thirdness.‖ [Peirce, 5.121]. The study of reasonableness had
ethical, theological and political implications [Apel, 1995, pp. 191-196], and
increasingly gave Peirce a paradoxical relationship to legal discourse [Peirce,
7.61].

CONCLUSION

To what extent does either Kevelson or Kort illustrate the full vision of
what Kevelson terms the ―perceived and perceivable consequences on the
actual lives of actual people in those societies where creative law exists and
flourishes?‖ The opportunity for creative and ―chaotic‖ qualities of dialogic
exchange, or ―semiotic structure of community-as-inter-relationship‖ possible
in mediation, conciliation, in public administration and counseling, in civil
domains especially like the family court, are not addressed by either author.
Peirce‘s ideas, however pertinent, clearly predate such modern practices. Thus,
the full potential for public and new contemporary media, in legal and social