Università Roma Tre

Why a course in intercultural law and global semiotics? Why should a contemporary jurist/lawyer acquire knowledge of semiotics?
The answer to these questions—which every student will ask as they consult the syllabus for this course—begins with a simple observation. Law is made up of words. Words are signs. The signs of which law consists are used to interpret and qualify the conduct of human beings along with the objects, phenomena and events involved in it. The correspondence and thereby application of laws to each case depends on the qualification of human conduct made by interpreters. This also applies to rules that through those words, from time to time, are provided by each legal system. The qualification of human conduct is not always identified with a work of translation. This is because in social contexts characterized by relative stability, the correspondence between the words of law and social facts is ensured, to a greater or lesser extent, by the culture of the social body and the corresponding communicative homogeneity. And yet within every act of legal qualification is nestled a translation. It is so because facts also need to be interpreted, and to interpret something you have to turn it into a sign. Thus, the whole legal activity includes a transposition/translation of the meaning of social facts into the meaning of legal rules so that these can be applied through the provided institutional procedures. What happens when interpretive usages, that is, the established way of matching signs related to social facts and signs contained in law, are confronted with situations of social change? When, for example, the ethno-social composition of the population varies? When citizens realize their interests and rights through activities that transcend the territorial and cultural boundaries of individual nations and their legal systems? When all this occurs, legal qualification returns to reveal the translational activity between signs—that is, between semiotic domains—that constitutes its genuine core. The globalization, and multicultural/multi-religious transformation of contemporary national societies correspond perfectly, if not extraordinarily, to the situations of change described above. Applying law--working as judges, lawyers, notaries, public officials or simply acting as subjects of the law--then necessarily implies acquiring the ability and adequate methodology for translation.
When social changes involve cultural and religious differences, the legal translator must consider more than just the words of another legal system. This is due to the circumstance that culture—as well as the religion that composes it or is anthropologically resilient in it despite secularization—is a system of signs. It includes not only words, but also objects, actions, territories, landscapes, behaviors, bodies, living systems and everything that exchanges information with the environment (from cells to plants, and so on). The translation of facts into legal norms occurs not only between languages but, precisely, between different semiotic systems as well as between the related spaces of experience. In short, to reach the correct legal qualification of the conduct of people from other cultures, the jurist/lawyer is called upon to perform an intersemiotic translation. To serve the purpose, such intersemiotic translation will have to be simultaneously 'global'—so as to cover all aspects of experience—and intercultural.
The above analysis has enormous and immediate practical effects. A genuine understanding of what the bargaining side of a different culture or religion says and does is not possible without adopting a semiotic-intercultural translation methodology. The same applies to the legal qualification of conduct in criminal law. In the same vein, properly decoding a testator's will is equally difficult, if not impossible, without the anthropological knowledge that a semiotic-intercultural translation methodology entails.
This course will provide students with the necessary skills to be able to engage an intercultural use of law. Acquiring these skills will enable them to navigate both the transnational dimension and the circuits of intercultural relations that increasingly take shape every day within national circuits. This skill may be applied to both legal counseling for businesses and legal assistance to individuals involved in intersubjective relationships with people of other cultures; in the work of judges as well as lawyers and notaries; in the performance of public official duties and public safety operators and so on. Semiotic and legal-intercultural skills are indispensable for any contemporary jurist, precisely because today the global creeps into every local context and has the potential to wedge itself into every intersubjective relationship-from trade to family experience-destined in one way or another to come under the lens of law.
In accordance with what has been illustrated so far, course topics will include:
1. What is culture?
2. What is global semiotics and its connection to contemporary spatial projections of legal experience?
3. Law, culture, religion: An intercultural approach to legal secularization.
4. Multicultural Societies and Intercultural Law.
5. Methodology of intercultural legal translation.
6. Intercultural contract law.
7. Intercultural family law.
8. Intercultural criminal law.
9. Legal practice and the intercultural use of law.

M. Ricca (2023), Intercultural Spaces of Law: Translating Invisibilities. Springer: Cham.
Chapters: 1-6: pp. 1 to 355.
Additional educational supports, also in relation to the learning objectives proposed by students, may be indicated by the professor during the lectures.