ABSTRACT
Law may seem unrelated to semiotics and political advertising. As fields of study, law and semiotics appear to be separated by a chasm of intellectual origin. However, Kevelson (1977, 1986) has written extensively about “legal semiotics,” revealing the underlying semiotic nature of legal decisions and policies. This chapter takes a somewhat different approach to integrating these fields, by showing how semiotic analysis can be applied to assist legal policy-making, especially in the regulation of speech. This chapter uses political advertising as a volatile platform to illustrate that application. Although semiotic analyses could certainly contribute to legal understandings of many aspects of political advertising, visual or verbal, our discussion focuses primarily on the visual and structural features of these ads.
