I introduction to legal semiotics -- Legal semiotics: the peircean frame -- Staking the claim/walking the field -- perspectives on the legal system -- A comparatist view -- Global developments -- The open hand -- The art of conversation -- Riddles, legal decisions, and peirce's "existential graphs" -- Speech acts: decisions -- Pure play: rules of law and rules of conduct -- Limits of authority in law -- Quid pro quo -- Contracts and equivalences -- The mapping of morals onto law: problems of rights, ethics, and values -- Economic justice: the "takings clause" and legal interpretation -- Economic links with law: the market as sign of a free society -- Signs of the naked and the dressed: contract and cause in law -- Interpretation and value -- Origins and development: hermeneutics of law and politics -- American realism -- The constitution as interpretant sign -- Property i -- Property -- Inquiry as method of freedom -- Inquiry and discovery procedures -- Conflict of laws: a complex indexical sign -- The means-end process of freedom in law.- references.
