"Von Savigny's "people"" [2019] ELECD 1379; in Broekman, M. Jan (ed), "Rethinking Law and Language" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) 70

Book Title: Rethinking Law and Language

Editor(s): Broekman, M. Jan

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: Von Savigny’s “people”

Number of pages: 32

Abstract/Description:

The nineteenth-century German jurist von Savigny started his legal, academic, and political career with studies of the Napoleonic Code. He underlined its style, its language, and its reference to the concept of possession (documented as legal property); broadened his studies on Roman law to found legal science (he coined the term “Rechtswissenschaft”); and introduced notions such as “legal sources” and “hermeneutics.” The linguistic dimensions of law and legal science focused on (a) the Speaker position and (b) legal consciousness. The latter idea fits the larger framework of legal semiotics. Consciousness and communication come together in von Savigny’s notion of “the People” (Das Volk), which leads him to widen the traditional understanding of the “subject of law.” That theme has important political implications, for instance regarding when legal notions of social reality should grasp pluralities by means of a single pronoun: an outstanding linguistic issue in law and legal science.