Dr Anne Wagner

ABSTRACT

Signs of Horror, Signs of Hope: Legal Semiotics in an Age of Crisis

The twenty-first century is witnessing not only a crisis of law but also a transformation in legal signs. Law no longer speaks exclusively through statutes, judgments, and institutional rituals. Increasingly, legality is produced, communicated, and contested through images, algorithms, digital platforms, biometric technologies, artificial intelligence, and networked forms of communication. Contemporary crises—war, ecological collapse, migration, surveillance, democratic erosion, and digital governance—are therefore not only legal and political crises but also crises of signification, mediated through competing narratives, symbols, visual cultures, and digital infrastructures that shape how authority, violence, justice, and resistance are understood.

Drawing upon the rich theoretical traditions of legal semiotics, this plenary argues that the central challenge facing the field is no longer simply the interpretation of legal texts but the analysis of increasingly multimodal, digital, and algorithmic ecologies of legal meaning. If law is fundamentally a process of semiosis, then contemporary legal crises must also be understood as transformations in the production, circulation, interpretation, and contestation of legal signs.

The plenary develops this argument through three interconnected movements. It first examines Signs of Horror, exploring how legal language, visual cultures, algorithmic systems, and digital infrastructures produce, legitimize, or obscure experiences of violence, exclusion, fear, and institutional decay. It then turns to Signs of Hope, considering how acts of interpretation, visual resistance, digital activism, alternative legal traditions, and emerging communicative practices generate new legal meanings and imaginaries of justice. Finally, it addresses The Future of Legal Semiotics, asking how the discipline must evolve in response to artificial intelligence, platform governance, multimodal legal communication, and new forms of human–machine interaction that are reshaping the production and circulation of legal signs.

Rather than treating horror and hope as opposing emotional states, this plenary approaches them as competing semiotic regimes through which legality is continuously negotiated in an age of profound uncertainty. In doing so, it seeks not only to reaffirm the enduring relevance of legal semiotics but also to propose a renewed research agenda for the field—one that moves beyond the interpretation of legal texts towards a broader understanding of how legal meaning is created, communicated, contested, and transformed across contemporary cultural and digital landscapes.

BIO

Anne Wagner (Ph.D. and Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches in Private Law) is a Research Associate Professor at Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale, Boulogne sur Mer, Laboratoire de recherche juridique (LARJ – UR3603) - (France).

Her main research lies in visual jurisprudence, legal semiotics, visual studies, language and law, legal culture and heritage, legal translation, legal terminology, law and the Humanities, and legal discourse studies. She is a recipient of the National Research Award (Rank A) for her research career.

She is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (Springer), President of the International Roundtables for the Semiotics of Law, Series Co-Editor of Law, Language and Communication (Routledge), Series Co-Editor of Gender, Justice and Legal Feminism (Springer), Series Co-Editor of Law and Visual Jurisprudence (Springer), and Series Co-Editor of Living Signs of Law (Springer).

She co-edited many reference books, including Prospects of Legal Semiotics (Springer 2011); Law, Culture and Visual Studies (Springer 2014); Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative: Public Memory, Identity, and Critique (2021), Springer, Winner of the 2021 Gherardi Davis Prize of the Flag Research Center); the Research Handbook on Jurilinguistics (Edward Elgar Publishing 2023); the Research Handbook on Legal Semiotics (Edward Elgar Publishing 2023); and (In)Visible Signs of Gender-Based Violence (Springer, 2025).

She is spearheading the preparation of an internationally authoritative encyclopedic reference work published by Springer, International Handbook of Legal Language and Communication: From Text to Semiotics, comprising 57 sections with nearly 20 chapters each and approximately 1,000 entries. -  ORCID: 0000-0001-6362-9023.