1 Law Beyond the Law: Editorial Introduction

Paragraph 1 was written by both guest editors of this SI. Elena Ioriatti authored paragraphs 2.1., 2.2., 2.3., 2.4., 2.5., 2.6., 3.1., 3.2., 3.7.; Mario Ricca wrote paragraphs 3.3., 3.4., 3.5., 3.6., 4.1., 4.2., 4.3.

The relationship between language and law has been a kind of ‘ground bass’—to use a musical metaphor—throughout Rodolfo Sacco’s long scientific journey. In his own unique way, this father of legal comparison always caught that relationship emphasizing its asymmetrical aspects. In his works, language appears to overdetermine law and condition it with its semiotic exceedance. A peculiar respect that, in some ways, seems to doom to shipwreck any theoretical assumption implying self-referentiality as inherent feature of—in sequence—law, its means of communication and, therefore, its paths to effectiveness. On the other hand, in Sacco’s eyes the legal phenomenon seems to be rooted in some features of the behavior and even cognitive habits of human beings that in turn exceed the words of law and the morphology of rules. This view is almost the opposite pole to the idea that there exists in experience something like a specific ‘province of law’ determined and determinable in mere positivist terms. Nevertheless, by virtue of a scientific gaze that never unmoored itself from a positivist posture, Rodolfo Sacco conveyed his unremitting commitment to legal comparison to bring to the surface some hidden/silent generators—so to speak—of both legal experience and legal structures ‘observable’ through the language of rules. His overall theoretical proposal, which finds its synthesis and, simultaneously, a doorway to future research in the discovery of legal ‘formants’ and ‘cryptotypes’ as tools for analyzing law in action holds inherent relevance for legal semiotics. This Special Issue aims to orchestrate the contributions of valuable comparatists—many of them his pupils—and legal philosophers in an effort to enhance the theoretical threads between legal semiotics and legal comparison that are interweaved in Sacco’s works. The intent is to highlight theoretical profiles that have not yet been fathomed in the hope to promote further research in the area that lies at the crossroads of comparative law and the semiotics of law.

The SI is divided into three sections, which follow each other according to this thematic sequence: Sect. 1: Bio-scientific Explorations. Section 2: Rodolfo Sacco beyond His Time: Theoretical Developments. Section 3: Philosophical Insights in Late Sacco.

2 Bio-scientific Explorations: Sect. 1

2.1 Life & Law in Sacco’s Experience: Reasons for a Research

What’s the point of a bio-scientific exploration? Rodolfo Sacco was an outstanding intellectual and scientific figure, whose cultural message and thought have become known worldwide, mostly because of his books, which have been translated into many languages. Sacco did not leave a biography, not even a scientific biography, with the exception of a well-known interview “What is comparative law” [1], which was however written in Italian, many years ago.

Thus, a way to comprehend Sacco’s thought is to rely on his own method, that’s to say observation. The fundamental legacy Sacco has left is his own intellectual posture, which, with due simplification, could be described as a continuous tension towards the observation of reality and so of many disciplines, and in particular of the legal phenomenon. This permanent commitment to uncovering the reality of the world of law was functional to finding solutions and then bringing them back into the realm of knowledge.

As an intellectually curious person, Sacco was always looking for open matters [2], and naturally inclined to finding answers, and so solutions. In comparative law, his distinctive approach to legal analysis had a remarkable similarity to physical sciences, as it presupposed a ‘tool use’ of comparative law methodology, based on observation and on the results that comparative law scholars had already achieved: uncovering how the world of law had been constructed by those who came before him was a necessary basis of his analysis and speculation.

Sacco’s studies on the rules governing the circulation of legal models were inspired by the well-known Italian linguist Matteo Bartoli’s research on linguistic mutations [3]. Sacco made no explicit attempt to describe his approach in methodological interdisciplinary terms, as he did, for instance, with ethnology and anthropology [4]. As a jurist, he simply observed the legal phenomena in the same way linguists did in their own field of research: measuring similarities and differences, comparing, registering mutations. Thus, he was one of the first jurists who observed the legal phenomena from outside, measuring similarities and differences and uncovering models in circulation.

These first attempts—that we would define nowadays as ‘methodological interdisciplinarity’—brought to light the reality of legal systems as dynamic entities, composed by layers of more or less stable models. Neologisms like ‘models,’ ‘circulation,’ ‘prestige’ were precisely coined by Sacco to make the reality of the mutations in the legal field visible to jurists and to describe the rules governing these flows.

This is the birth of the legal ‘formants’—term borrowed from phonetics—norms (explicitly formulated by legislators, ruled by courts and elaborated in scholarly works, or implicitly like the cryptotypes) to be uncovered as the answers—solutions—to a precise comparative law research question [5]. The aim is the measurement of similarities and differences among legal systems (or even within one single system). In essence, formants are methodological tools, and so, just like the tools employed in the physical sciences, instruments of investigation, utilized to enhance perception and to make reality visible [6]. Ever since the beginning, the theory of the legal formants shed light on the distinction between the operational rules—the practices of a legal system—and the definitions, for instance used by the legislator designing the official norms. Once again, the formants mirror the synthesis of Sacco’s own scientific personality, that of an explorer, who by detaching the different legal systems and measuring the formants uncovered the legal phenomenon in its real dimension, which despite apparent differences might be composed by common definitions or common operational rules.

It is precisely this profile of Sacco’s personality that the following contributions will describe.

2.2 Rodolfo Sacco’s Theoretical Contribution to Comparative Law: A Personal Account

How is it possible that, despite Sacco proving himself a pioneering thinker, steering research in novel directions, he never wrote an opera on comparative law methodology, or announced a lecture on methods? This is an unavoidable question – posed by Michele Graziadei —to understand the Master legal thought, who had set himself a broad and ambitious intellectual programme: this is Graziadei’s answer to that question, as Sacco never turned comparative law inwards, but aimed this science to contribute to the understanding of law and, consequently, to legal knowledge generally intended. This is a key aspect of Sacco’s intellectual posture, at the basis of his contributions that were so insightful from a theoretical point of view that they seemed to have always been present in that legal culture, system or language. The backdrop of Graziadei’s analysis is represented by some of Sacco’s innovative theoretical contributions—the theory of the legal formants in particular—in order to allow his scientific and intellectual program of thought to be unfolded.

2.3 Rodolfo Sacco’s Scientific Parabola

Attilio Guarneri’s contribution, as a biographer of Sacco’s scientific heritage, is the ideal point of departure of this section. The Author presents Sacco’s contribution to legal culture as the watershed between the legal-cultural environment in which Rodolfo Sacco initially operated and the legal phenomenon he left us, in terms of scientific thought and of his contribution to legal education and academic life: it was thanks to his thought as a polyhedric scientist that he contributed to direct the world of law from an arid, territorial, monolingual vision to a variegated and cosmopolitan one: into a legal knowledge without limits of space and time, where the scientific boundaries do not coincide with the political ones as composed by formal and non-formal, explicit and implicit elements.

2.4 Shedding Light on the Dark Corners of the Law, by Walking Hand in Hand with Professor Sacco, Master of Italian Comparative Law

According to Elisabetta Grande, one of the major and lasting contributions of Italian scholarship to the discipline of comparative law emerges in particular in Sacco’s observation of mute law as part of the legal reality of Non-Western Legal Traditions. By relying on a tale of the Sufi tradition, Elisabetta Grande methaphors Sacco’s capacity of illuminating the dark places of law, finding where no one had sought it before legal dynamics that were invisible until then. In its capacity of making reality, whilst also uncovering elements of convergence in present high conflicting times, Sacco’s message is proposed as a current way of looking beyond the lamppost, where there is no light, to find numerous points of convergence hidden beneath the surface of the highly visible reasons for conflict.

2.5 Rodolfo Sacco and the Multiple Relations Between Law and Language

Barbara Pozzo builds on an assumption according to which the ‘subversive force’ of Sacco’s commitment to understand the legal phenomena is also due to his contribution to linguistics and legal translation. Advocating for a sustained commitment to Sacco’s research in linguistics, she argues that thanks to his scientific results, the vision of the world of law has never been the same anymore, but has become more realistic. In essence, her chapter is a complete description of Sacco’s interest and scientific and academic contributions in the field of the relations between law and language. The bio-scientific exploration is enriched by Pozzo’s description of the environment in which Sacco was immersed since his youth, a multilingual environment where social interaction happened to impose the use of many languages, often during the same day.

2.6 The Language Issue in Law. A Recollection of Rodolfo Sacco’s Contribution to Interpretation

According to Silvia Ferreri “Language was an important component of Sacco’s scientific history, but in large company of other interests that spanned a truly boundless horizon”. The key idea is that it was Sacco’s interest in the relationship between law and legal language to drive him to many other research paths and international contacts with foreign scholars, composing a kaleidoscopic variety of scientific investigations. Among them, Rodolfo Sacco devoted much of his attention to the issue of interpretation—already in his final law degree dissertation—then to legal anthropology, to law as one of the engines of the circulation of models, to the connection between words and concepts and to mute law. Within the framework of his curiosity about language the Author also considers Sacco’s personal passion for ‘ethnolanguages’ (dialects).

Ultimately, Sacco’s proceeding in his investigation of the legal phenomenon is portrayed on his approaching the relationship between law and language, which says a lot about his originalism and his nature of explorer of the world of law.

3 Rodolfo Sacco Beyond His Time: Theoretical Developments—Sect. 2

3.1 Form and Substance in Comparative Law and Legal Interpretation

Since the beginning of his career, Rodolfo Sacco’s thought has been focusing on legal interpretation too and produced his well-known Theory of the Legal Formants, as a model of interpretation able to unveil internal dissociations within the elements constituting a legal system.

Following Sacco’s example, Monateri dives into narrative tropes as models of legal interpretation—the Tarskian Correspondence Model, the Symphonic Model of Significance, the Heraclitean Realism and the Provocative Tapestry Model—and detaches their implications in comparative law. The exploration unveils a narrative landscape that is functional to visualize the pluralism inherent in legal interpretation, which is unanchored by the political dimension. The law as a pick of significance, implies a narrative that inserts its roots into a social environment and it is up to the human agency to introduce the political dimension. By comparing legal systems across jurisdictions, comparative law can disclose the space in which the different dimensions can be analyzed “highlighting the independence of political decisions from the dominant narrative, underscores that these modes of discourse serve as conduits for conveying political decisions rather than dictating them”. Monateri concludes by warning the legal professions, as actors responsible in shaping the normative landscape and the continuous evolution of legal meaning.

3.2 False Conscience: Sustainability and Smart Evolution—Between Law and Power

Ugo Mattei’s contribution exploring the boundary between law and non-law is dedicated to Rodolfo Sacco, who made these frontiers a pioneering research novel direction. Ugo Mattei builds his argument on a starting point, an irrepressible regression of the law, understood statist vertical normativity of law as the manifestation of a sovereign will from top to bottom—with soft law representing the main strategy to subordinate the law to the interests of the economy and de facto power granted to those who control technology.

The contribution is to be read in the context of a wider analysis carried out by Ugo Mattei, related to the consequences of the technological transformation occurred in the last twenty-five years and of the new technological state of affairs, leading to substitute professional lawyers with algorithms and the law with technological control [7].

3.3 ‘So Lonely’: Comparative law and the quest for interdisciplinary legal education

Giorgio Resta's essay focuses on the relationship between the inspirational insights undergirding Sacco’s category of formants, and the need to grasp law as a fold of the polyphonic texture of human experience. Resta builds his theoretical proposal on a thorough critique of the positivist approach and the alleged cognitive ‘self-sufficiency’ of legal knowledge. He reveals all the flaws of this way of interpreting research in the field of law, emphasizing the connection of this approach and its historical plausibility with the predominantly state and national dimensions of past legal experience and scope of the related legal system. The author underscores how the collapse of socio-cultural circuits demarcated by nation-state boundaries makes the positivist-derived methodological ‘tool-kit’ inadequate for understanding how and why contemporary legal experience changes and develops. In this sense, Resta does not fail to point out how Rodolfo Sacco’s ‘investigations’ of legal formants from a comparative perspective function as a theoretical precedent already wedged in the positivist cultural milieu that was dominant during his time. Current developments in comparative law, also in the wake of the insights pioneeringly proffered by the Italian comparatist, place this research area in a privileged position both theoretically and pedagogically. Resta makes manifest how the comparatist’s habit of casting a glance elsewhere and from elsewhere actually makes it much easier for these researchers to take an interdisciplinary view of legal experience. The essay concludes with an analysis that straddles common law and civil law, outlining the possibilities of developing a ‘legal knowledge’ in tune with contemporary socio-political and cultural challenges.

3.4 Reflections on the principles of remoteness in contract in comparative law

Katy Barnett's ‘scientific-diasporic' essay undertakes an extraordinary transcultural legal-anthropological journey with captivating results. The ‘Remoteness Clause’ is the categorical vessel the author pilots to navigate—in her own words— “through different times, continents and cultures, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first century, across the law of France, United States, England and Wales, India and Australia, among other jurisdictions.” The semantic-deontic gist of the 'remoteness clause' lies in the three-way relationship between human knowledge, time and responsibility. It is a trinomial endowed with profound anthropological significance that reveals its cross-cultural import precisely through the expansiveness of the author's inquiry across time and space. Taking up and reworking Sacco's idea of formant in anthropological-legal terms, Barnett takes legal comparative research beyond its typical boundaries by discerning a site for the production of human subjectivity in the 'contractual matrix'. The essay provides the building-blocks for an intercultural contractual lexicon from which contemporary legal experience could meaningfully draw, both in theoretical and practical terms, to face a range of modern global challenges.

3.5 Lurking Glares. A comparative critique of latency and cryptotypes

In her article, Cristina Costantini analyzes Sacco’s long scholarly journey by pivoting around the category of ‘latency.’ This approach allows the author to develop an original reading of Sacco’s investigation of the ‘unspoken’ in legal experience. The contribution reveals in great depth how and why comparative analysis makes newly visible all that is unexpressed and latent—but no less decisive and constitutive—in legal experience. Semantic and pragmatic continuities and discontinuities show the links between law and the production of meaning, laying bare the debt that formal law owes, in terms of its validity and efficacy, to the making of culture understood broadly.

3.6 Rodolfo Sacco's Legacy: Insights from a Young Scholar

In her essay, Caterina Bergomi traces a brief genealogy of Sacco’s seminal contribution to formant theory as part of his broader interest in the interdependence of language and law. From this perspective, the author proposes to reconsider Sacco’s theoretical legacy in comparative law studies by analyzing it, somewhat retrospectively, across the spectrum of contemporary EU legal experience. The relationship between legal comparison and linguistic pluralism finds in the unfolding of the EU’s institutional and law-making action a kind of paradigmatic circuit of emergence. In this sense, Caterina Bergomi demonstrates, by critically retracing the kaleidoscope of problems related to multilingualism in the European legislative process, how the EU dimension constitutes a kind of laboratory in which the farsightedness of the theoretical insights developed in his time by Sacco appear echoed by the same later historical experience.

3.7 Lawscapes

After having tested his method within the Western Legal Tradition, equipped with the formants, Sacco extended his investigation beyond it, exploring the Russian legal system before the fall of the Berlin wall and Africa too. In Africa, in particular, Sacco realized that observing reality required the courage to go beyond it and to consider the extra—rational dimension. This respectful observation allowed Sacco to uncover elements which are “norms unthinkable for European jurists”, like the presence of magic elements or of supernatural occult powers. His observation contributed to uncover the truth of the legal pheonomenon in its real complexity and even mute dimension. The ‘lawscape’ introduced by Salvatore Mancuso is an umbrella concept denominating a given legal reality producing fluxes, which result in a change in the receiving systems. The Autor research question on “how to look at this phenomenon” is analized by means of an African case study and relies on Appadurai’s theory of the -scapes, resulting in different dimensions (ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes) as an outcome of “global cultural fluxes”. This phenomenon is composed by a number of factors, which are often not strictly legal from the point of view of the Western legal tradition, but—as note by the Author—to which “are strictly intertwined that separating them becomes a non-sense.”

4 Philosophical Insights in Late Sacco—Sect. 3

4.1 Rodolfo Sacco’s Discovery of Mute Behaviour. A Semiotic Outlook

The essay proffered by Paolo di Lucia and Filippo Fiore examines the notion of ‘mute behaviour’ that Sacco proposed alongside the better-known category of ‘mute law.’ The authors problematize ‘mute behavior’ insofar as—in their own words— “the idea of a behaviour devoid of any linguistic meaning and yet capable of bringing into being legally relevant situations may not—apparently—be entirely convincing.” Their analysis begins with a critical assessment of the distinction proposed by Sacco—based on Saussure’s linguistic theory, according to the authors —between signs and symptoms. The authors proceed to clarify the distinction—admittedly not very clear in Sacco’s writings—by identifying ‘symptom’ as a type of sign based on a prior signification that corresponds to a culturally predetermined code. In support of this distinction, they recall the category of ‘presentational meanings’ elaborated by Morpurgo-Tagliabue. Combining these multiple hermeneutic-reconstructive frameworks, the authors come to define ‘mute behaviour’ as an action that conveys meaning but without any prior stipulative agreement on its content. The next step in the analysis of Sacco's theorization explores a further distinction: that between ‘speech act’ and ‘mute behavior.’ Next, the authors propose two clarifying dichotomies. The first distinguishes essentially mute behavior from accidentally mute behavior; the second, nonverbal mute behavior from semantic behavior. From these two dichotomies, Di Lucia and Fiore extract a question endowed—so to speak—with theoretically generative import, namely: “Is the concept of mute behaviour complementary to the concept of speech act?” Their answer is negative. It is based on the empirical finding that in experience there are behaviors—such as, for example, handshakes—that are endowed with legal relevance and effects but that cannot be qualified either as ‘mute behavior’ or as ‘speaking acts.’ Even their semantic scope, however, is based on a pre-existing communicative code. The authors propose to define these behaviors by means of a third category: ‘sema-pragmatic acts’ (in law).

4.2 On the Mode of Existence of Mute Law and the Inference of Cryptotypes

In his essay, Lorenzo Passerini Glazel addresses a crucial issue within Sacco’s scientific writings. He focuses on the possibility of demonstrating the existence of ‘legal cryptotypes.’ In addressing this problematic knot, Passerini-Glazel deals preliminarily with the general issue of the relationship between the spoken and the unspoken in law, specifically regarding its validity and efficacy. Relying on an earlier proposal by Amedeo Conte, the author observes how the validity and existence of a legal norm is based on more than formal or linguistic elements. As a whole, every verbalized norm is underpinned by what Conte calls an overall ‘deontic state of affairs,’ which is also a condition for its validity. Nevertheless, when Sacco proposes the category of ‘cryptotypes,’ he is referring to the factuality of legal phenomena rather than their validity. In this regard, Passerini Glazel asks whether the validity of a legal phenomenon can also be inferred from its mere factuality, as intended by Sacco. The author’s answer is provisionally negative. However, his analysis does not stop here. Passerini Glazel suggests using another category proposed by Conte, that of ‘deontic noemata’, to provide a theoretical framework compatible with Sacco’s idea of ‘cryptotype.’ The ‘deontic noema’ is—according to Conte’s classification—an intentional object of consciousness. In other words, it is the representation of a “situation endowed with deontic denotation,” which does not necessarily have an actual correspondence with a valid legal norm or rule. Moreover, according to Passerini Glazel something similar can be also traced in Kelsen’s Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie des Staates. From this point forward, the author proceeds to create a hermeneutic interpenetration between the doctrine of deontic noema and the idea of ‘mute law’ as proposed by Sacco. To this end, he makes use of Ota Weinberger’s theory regarding the points of contact with practical experience that would endow norms—which would in and of themselves be ideal entities—with ‘reality.’ And this precisely because, thanks to those points of contact, they are endowed with a connection to what might be called an actual social ‘chronotope.’ One issue—and not a small one—remains unresolved, however. According to Sacco, ‘cryptotypes’ are not only non-verbalized norms/rules but even unconscious, unrepresented ones. In this regard, Passerini Glazel raises the question, “Can a deontic noema, i.e., the intentional object of a normative experience, be unconscious?” Is this not—the author continues—a case of contradictio in adiecto? To face this dilemma, he proposes thinking of the deontic norm as a kind of semiotic deontic cloud, a kind of overdetermining legal atmosphere that induces the unconscious adoption of certain behaviors. The regular adoption of these behaviors could be equated, according to Passerini Glazel, with Sacco’s unconscious cryptotypes. But, if the normative clouds that stimulate the adoption of certain behaviors are unconscious, how could and should their existence be ascertained? The answer to this further question is drawn from Carcaterra’s criteria for the ascertainment of a normative substrate underlying behavioral regularities. In this sense, Passerini Glazel proposes—inter alia—the normogenetic function of some social reactions that he designates as ‘nomotrophic behaviors.’ His analysis of legal cryptotypes—as conceived by Sacco—is original and turns to all possible resources to rescue the insights of their ‘inventor.’ The question remains open as to whether the criteria for ascertaining the existence of ‘cryptotypes’ proposed by the author can avoid falling into the ‘fallacy of affirming the consequent.’ Any discussion of this, however, is beyond the scope of our introduction to this SI.

4.3 The Figure of the Unknown in Sacco's Theory

A perfect follow-up, and at the same time a significant detour, from Passerini Glazel’s interpretation of the unexpressed and unconscious dimension of legal experience can be found in Paolo Heritier's  essay. Passerini Glazel proposes to resolve the inconsistencies hovering in the idea of ‘cryptotype’ and Sacco’s idea of ‘mute law’ by referring to an immanent and silent/implicit, but socio-communally codified, dimension of meaning and deontology. In a symmetrically opposite manner, Heritier traces the hermeneutic code useful to giving some degree of coherence to both the ‘spoken/unspoken’ and the ‘formal or positive law/customary or latent law’ polarizations present in Sacco’s thought, in the inexhaustible generativity of the unknown and, therefore, (still) unrepresented wholeness of experience. To arrive at this conclusion, Heritier draws a long path that begins by placing the three main blocks of Sacco’s thought—namely, the non-objectivity of legal interpretation, the plurality of formants, and mute law—within a scholarly dialectic germinated in the academic environment of Turin. In tracing the stages of this ‘dialogical affair,’ Heritier progressively brings out the growing relevance acquired by the aesthetic dimension as a 'receptacle' of the features/figurations of meaning that undergird the ‘emergence’ of law. The idiomatic aspect of Heritier’s theoretical proposal can be grasped in the qualification of that receptacle as an origin, i.e., a genealogical factor, which is not displaced in a remote and radically non-present past. On the contrary, he proposes to read the relationship between ‘the spoken’ and ‘the unspoken’ in Sacco’s thought as his latent, but perhaps never fully conscious insight, that the origin has real semantic substance only as a ‘consequence of the future.’ This hermeneutical perspective—which takes shape through reference to the works of Hayek, de Robilant, Gorla, Monateri, Goodrich, Sherwin, Gigliotti, Gallo and Nerhot—aims to find an interface between the institutionalized and/or historical domain of ‘the socially signified’ and the semiotic ocean of experience from which the production of ‘the social signifying’ ceaselessly emanates. This interface is what allows for a comparative reading of different legal systems—coextensive to Sacco’s ‘Ur-figuration’ of the ‘unspoken and unintentional in legal experience’—to transmute in an intercultural interpretive gaze on the ongoing process of globalization and delocalization of legal experience. In this way, both the contemporary de-spatialization and unremitting re-spatialization of communicative relationships in today’s legal phenomena can be grasped by means of an epistemological approach that overcomes the coincidence between situated institutionalizations and the inherent semiotic ossification of linguistic/deontic representations that structures the morphology of modern state legal systems. This is possible precisely by recovering the relationship that ties every representation to its framework of meaning, which in turn is rooted in the holistic unity of experience understood as an aesthetic synthesis of form and substance, immaterial and material, spiritual and corporeal, qualitative and quantitative, and so on. The semiotic fluidity of this dimension is what enables both the metaphorization—in an etymological spatial-semantic sense—and the interpenetration of the spaces of action that are summarized and presupposed in the morphology of the rules of each circuit of experience and the related formal legal coordinates. Mute law, in this sense, is not so much that which underlies the law that already is, but rather the invisible source of the making of law through the ‘po(i)etic’ remapping of experiential spaces, their continuities and discontinuities. Mute law, again, should be understood as the dynamic circuit where value and fact find their interpenetration and conflation in the act of poetic/poietic regeneration of ‘world making’: namely, a socio-communicative happening co-extensive with the renewing of human action. In this sense, Heritier suggests, mute law should be identified as ‘mutolo’ law—the formula suggested by Vico—that is, a law reconnected and reconciled with its mythical, creative, and thereby anthropo-socio-po(i)etic function. Finally, the ‘mute/mutolo’ in law is the inexhaustible semiotic ingredient of the unremitting revival of legal experience beyond (and despite) its own past actualizations.