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From Inherited Meaning to Legal Category: Language and Law

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SCOTUS. AI image Introduction Recent debates before the United States Supreme Court concerning sex-segregated sports have revived a question that appears, at first glance, almost self-evident: what is a woman? The persistence of this question, however, suggests that the difficulty does not arise from everyday language suddenly failing to function. Speakers of English continue to use the term without hesitation in ordinary contexts. The problem emerges instead when an inherited word from natural language is transferred into a legal system that depends on explicit, operational categories in order to adjudicate rights and obligations. This article approaches the controversy not from a legal or ethical standpoint, but from a linguistic and semiotic one. Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure’s conception of language as an inherited social institution, together with Roland Barthes’s distinction between first-order and second-order semiotic systems, it argues that the current impasse reflects ...
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How Meaning Is Stabilized: Definitions Across Law, Philosophy, and Linguistics

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Introduction Across disciplines such as law, philosophy, and the sciences, definitions play a decisive role. They shape understanding, limit ambiguity, and make shared reasoning possible. This article examines how definitions function in legal texts, how philosophical traditions have questioned stable meaning, and how Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic framework helps clarify what is at stake when language becomes opaque rather than precise. Instead of opposing rigor to complexity, the aim here is to show that conceptual depth does not require obscurity, and that even critical or destabilizing thought depends on some degree of shared linguistic ground. Definitions in Legal Texts: Ensuring Precision and Consistency In legal writing, the inclusion of a dedicated section for “definitions” or “interpretation” serves to clarify and fix the meanings of key terms employed throughout a statute. The primary objective of this practice is to reduce ambiguity and minimize the risk of diver...
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