Editorial 7: From prize-winning seminar papers to a general conclusion

This part of the Source Book focuses on trends to develop semiotic awareness in legal education and laws practices. Its texts could be understood as presenting the ultimate goal of positioning the semiotics of law in legal education. Their broadening knowledge might bring a deeper understanding of legal practice, and a heightening semiotic awareness. Before concluding this volume with an essay on laws position in signifying processes, we therefore offer three prize-winning papers written in the course of 2011/2012 Roberta Kevelson Seminars on Law & Semiotics at the Dickinson School of Law, Penn State University, USA. They show the result of such awareness as applied in specific fields of student interests. It has often been observed that semiotic studies are confronted with a transition or translation of facts in daily life into legal language and consequently life as conceived terms of legal discourse. The prize-winning papers are all three linked with this transition. In other words: all three authors have chosen a subject that is deeply anchored in daily life. Their semiotic awareness has been initiated here, and not in any philosophical or jurisprudential subject. How relate words of a judge to the freedom of a citizen? How does highly criticized corporate activity receive legal- and State protection? What can we trust in suggestions of scientific evidence? These issues are altogether considerations in the street and loaded with legal-semiotic relevance.