The main goal of the course is to provide students with the legal and interdisciplinary skills necessary for the intercultural use of positive law. The didactic-pedagogical value of the training in intercultural law arises from the progressive and rapid change in the cultural and anthropological-religious composition of state legal system subjects. Hence, the course aims to provide the student with the necessary tools to apply national and supranational law to situations and relationships characterized by cultural and religious difference. The student should learn to exercise cross-cultural legal competence in order to ensure in all cases respect for the principles of freedom, equality, and inclusive pluralism set forth in the Italian Constitution and the fundamental principles of supranational and international legal sources. To this end, it is essential that the student build up specific skills in intercultural and inter-legal translation. This knowledge will be provided during the course through an interdisciplinary training involving the application of notions of translational semiotics to the resolution of practical cases. The crucial focus of teaching is to train jurists/lawyers capable of practicing in global and intercultural contexts so as to support social subjects in the achievement of their interests and the related legal protection. The course is specifically geared toward empowering law students to enter the world of work as ‘global jurists.’ That is, jurists able to put their skills at the service of Italian and foreign law subjects, both nationally and internationally, in their public and daily activities.
As regards practical cases, the student should acquire analytical skills and the ability to process solutions to legal cases by showing good levels of understanding, communication and disposition to deal with contemporary legal experiences in critical-creative terms.
At the end of the course, the student should show adequate knowledge of and ability, respectively:
(a) to analyze and reconstruct in a theoretical-practical perspective the categories of contemporary legal experience in relation to its intercultural projections and the claims for legal protection arising from cultural and religious difference.
(b) articulate basic knowledge related to, in sequence:
1) the methodology of intercultural law applied to the categories of native and other legal cultures and religious laws;
2) intercultural and inter-legal translation and the related semiotic tools;
3) understanding and use of law in a global and inclusive perspective within the circuits of national and transnational secular legal experience.
2030 AGENDA GOALS
5, 8, 10, 11, 16.
As regards practical cases, the student should acquire analytical skills and the ability to process solutions to legal cases by showing good levels of understanding, communication and disposition to deal with contemporary legal experiences in critical-creative terms.
At the end of the course, the student should show adequate knowledge of and ability, respectively:
(a) to analyze and reconstruct in a theoretical-practical perspective the categories of contemporary legal experience in relation to its intercultural projections and the claims for legal protection arising from cultural and religious difference.
(b) articulate basic knowledge related to, in sequence:
1) the methodology of intercultural law applied to the categories of native and other legal cultures and religious laws;
2) intercultural and inter-legal translation and the related semiotic tools;
3) understanding and use of law in a global and inclusive perspective within the circuits of national and transnational secular legal experience.
2030 AGENDA GOALS
5, 8, 10, 11, 16.
teacher profile teaching materials
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.
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.
Programme
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.
Core Documentation
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.
Type of evaluation
The examination will be oral and will consist of ascertaining the student's acquisition of the fundamental categories of legal-intercultural methodology as defined by the syllabus and training objectives. In evaluating the examination, the determination of the final grade will take into account, in sequence: the level and quality of knowledge of the topics covered in class and/or presented in the adopted texts; the ability to analyze the individual methodological and substantive aspects of intercultural law critically; the argumentative ability with respect to individual issues; the ability to apply the theoretical and methodological elements of both intercultural law methodology and intersemiotic-translation to practical contexts; and the acquisition of the terminology proper to the intercultural law.