Progress on Criminal Record Relief for Trafficking Survivors
What comes to your mind once you hear the word ‘meme’? Probably you think of memes as silly
pictures circulating on the internet. Perhaps, if you are interested in
exploring various
sciences, you think of a meme in the as any piece of information transmitting meanings. Thus,
memes are indeed those silly pictures, but they are
also much more than just that: memes
are any
phrases and otherwise spread bits of meaningful data which we encounter on- and offline.
What does the law have to do with this? As a highly conceptual and rigid language, law is full of
memes. Moreover, Consider it yourself: the language of law is so
inflexible that many legal
concepts like culpa in contrahendo or mens rea persist as meaningful phrases for millennia.
Thus, these legal memes are easy to trace back in
time and see how the law evolves
throughout
generations.
Memetics does exactly this: traces back the development of organisms through bits of data
transmitted by genes, it tracks down the evolution of meanings through
circulation of
memes.
Hence, the whereabouts of such ancient legal concepts as ‘crime’ or ‘jus soli’ can show more
general development of the legal vocabulary, the
legal doctrine, and by extension of the
law and
societies where these concepts have been used for spans of many eras.
I utilised memetics in my study of law as I was tracing an exceptional progress made by a very
recent legal concept, the ‘gay propaganda’ ban. It originated as in the
1980s that banned
the
‘promotion of homosexuality’ in British schools. It then turned up in the in the 1990s. As a
successful catchphrase in a slightly new form of the
‘propaganda of homosexuality’, it as a
provincial directive. Eventually, it was enhanced by the power of federal law: initially ‘gay
propaganda’ legislation was introduced
in 2013 and it was amended to widen In my book I
uncover
that the invocation of this meme in the official discourse of the Kremlin prepares ground for
actual harm,
including physical attacks on LGBT+ people.
The study of legal memes is not new. However, if the methodology of legal memetics means simply
tracing particular catchphrases in a limited corpus of legal texts,
then it appears too
positivist. This is why for Socio-Legal Studies I propose a newer approach, Discursive Memetics.
Previous approaches treat law as a limited
collection of published texts. Within this
definition, court rulings, statutes, and contracts appear as the law; whereas our practices and
thoughts about the law, legal
scholars’ comments and legislators’ rationales, as well as
many
other types of texts are excluded from the scope of conventional legal memetics. Additionally,
what
researchers usually look at is a specific legal phrase, a term rather than a concept.
I
argue against such positivism.
In my approach, the law is treated as discourse. Hence, first, different things fall into what
counts as law: wherever legal meaning is transmitted, there is law. Socio-
Legal Studies
make it
perfectly clear that the law cannot be limited to a set of defined texts such as precedents or
statutes. Instead, a much wider variety of discursive
forms should be regarded. This is why
I
refer to this approach as discursive memetics: it is about encompassing the entire discourse of
law rather than simply a bunch
of texts.
Second, legal concepts may appear stable in time and place, but they may as well not
be. Perhaps, a few Roman legal terms indeed persisted over a couple of
millennia. Yet, a
concept
is a much wider phenomenon than its articulated time- and place-specific term. The ‘gay
propaganda’ concept demonstrates this very well: it
took off as ‘promotion of
homosexuality’ and
resonated as ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations’ in Russia; or ‘LGBT-free zones’ in
Poland; or the ‘Don’t Say
Gay Bill’ in the USA. The list may be continued. The point is
that
Discursive Memetics traces specific meanings, not specific catchphrases. This is especially
relevant for
the interdisciplinary borderlands of Socio-Legal Studies because it allows a
broader conceptualisation of law and a more inclusive approach to its vocabulary.
