ABSTRACT
The power of ‘the word’ and of language generally were signalled at the beginning. This brief conclusion finishes by signalling-and no more, for this text is eminently a practical manual-that only a partial understanding is reached if one does not consider the power of the authority of law, attached to the flexibility of words; the power of law’s context, of status; the power of the privileging of law over other institutions, and of its interpretation of words over other interpretation of those words. Law is applied, used or created by people acting in roles dealing with the memories of the law. ‘The question of interpretation is that of whose memory, whose order of reference, does the law institute’ (Goodrich (1990:253)).
