Cognition, Meaning Making, and Legal Communication Jan Engberg • Kirsten Wølch Rasmussen Published online: 21 May 2010 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 Many treatises on law, language and semiotics start out by stating correctly that law and language are deeply intertwined. The basic reason for the correctness of this statement is the fact that law as (fundamentally a system of) meaning is only accessible through (linguistic) signs and thus dependent on the process of interpreting the signs. One of the interesting things about the assertion of the entanglement of language and law, however, is that it may be held by scholars propagating logically oriented context-free approaches to legal argumentation (and thus to the relation between language and law) as well as by scholars propagating post-modern, constructivist and deconstructionist approaches. So stating the intertwined relation between language and law obviously does not say anything substantial about the conceptualisation by the utterer concerning this relation, as it is possible to subsume fairly different things under the concept of language. Therefore, in order to make sense of the statement that law and language are deeply intertwined it is important to assess what status language as a concept has for the holder of the argument in order to know, what the statement actually means. For example, in a Saussurean approach to language and meaning, language is mainly langue, i.e., the abstract structure deductible from the linguistic activities of speakers of the language. The cognitive processes of understanding performed by the individual are not seen as very important in the conceptualisation of the language seen as system, as langue, although it is recognised that legal activity has importance for legal system. Instead, language in this view is predominantly conceptualized as an abstract entity on which we draw in our linguistic activities, but which we do not influence to any major degree. J. Engberg (&) Á K. W. Rasmussen Department of Language and Business Communication, Aarhus School of Business, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: je@asb.dk K. W. Rasmussen e-mail: kwr@asb.dk 123 Int J Semiot Law (2010) 23:367–371 DOI 10.1007/s11196-010-9161-1