Normative and Ideological Coding in the Legal Register – The Case of the 19th-Century Legal Language

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodological approach to the study of legal language, grounded in the framework developed by the Croatian and Yugoslav legal scholar Nikola Visković in his book Jezik prava (The Language of the Law), published in Zagreb in 1989. Visković approaches legal language from semiotic and communicative perspectives. We adapt his framework to examine nineteenth‑century Serbian legal texts dating from 1835 to 1898. Our starting assumption is that legal language is double‑coded: it operates simultaneously with a natural‑language code (in this case, the nineteenth‑century Serbian literary idiom) and with a distinct legal code. A second assumption distinguishes the legal norm as a deep, universal structure from the legal provision, which is its surface representation. This distinction enables us to identify various surface realizations of the basic if–then legal norm. The third assumption differentiates normative from ideological coding in legal texts: we contend that the basic if–then form can be reconstructed in every legal text, while what remains constitutes the ideological residue. This does not imply that ideological coding is absent from the underlying form of the legal norm, but rather that the basic legal norm exhibits a degree of universality across different legal language corpora. Nineteenth‑century Serbian legal texts provide a particularly clear illustration of these claims, especially those produced during the era of the Ustavobranitelji (literally, the Defenders of the Constitution). In that period, preambles were often lengthy and comprised both obligatory normative elements and motivational passages that were not required by the legal norm but encoded ideological, political, and cultural contextual information.