Call for Papers: Special Issue--Spatial Dimensions and Cultural Changes in Contemporary Legal Experience (International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique)

I am delighted to pass along the following CfP for what promises to be an exception issue of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique guest edited by the brilliant Anne Wagner and José Manuel Aroso Linhares

Call for Papers: Special Issue--Spatial Dimensions and Cultural Changes in Contemporary Legal Experience.


International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique

Vol. 38/1 (2025)

Guest Editors - Anne Wagner & José Manuel Aroso Linhares

Law involves spatial dynamics, and as such law is like an integrated circuit with two main lines of development, at times autonomous, at others conflicting with each other to reveal a new vision of reality. This integrated circuit thereby enables the Law to grow with the life surrounding it, while simultaneously reviving concepts sometimes far too deeply rooted in a predetermined time period. Yet the Law as a living organism has the ability to territorialize a concept, while also creating alternative trajectories or deterritorialization routes for more modern and contemporaneous visions. In this way, this two-stage integrated circuit may be a source of either promise or struggle in addressing and understanding new visions of the Law. Hence, we also need to speak about these lines of resistance - i.e., refusal/hindrances of evolution or adaptation, as well as about these lines of transformation - i.e., acceptance of an evolving world with new conceptions of the past living reality. All this without forgetting a meta-discursive plan or perspective, in which the different contemporary conceptions of law and legal discourse, while considering these lines of resistance and transformation, significantly overlap and conflict: the plurality of these conceptions is actually dynamized by two unmistakable irreducible poles, one of them giving law a purely instrumental identity (within the limits of a pragmatic functionalization), the other one reinventing the symbolic and practical-cultural possibilities of its discursive autonomy (as well as the inter-semiotic claim that this autonomy demands).

Contributions may address the spatial dynamics and cultural changes that could be read as a source of legal tension but also as a place of cultural (ex)changes in contemporary law and legal theory.

Submissions should be addressed to Anne Wagner (valwagnerfr@yahoo.com) and José Manuel Aroso Linhares (linhares@fd.uc.pt)

- Abstracts of 300 words by 15 September 2023.

- After selection, final papers (no more than 10,000 words) should be submitted by 15 February 2024.