This book should be the gateway to a variety of texts for those who encounter the bewildering expression “semiotics of law”. Once we fi nd ourselves in the position to meet those words, they help to be a reader, a listener, a speaker, or provide an orientation in space and time. The history of legal semiotics, now at least a century old, has never been written (a non-event itself pregnant with semiotic possibility). As a consequence, its sources are seldom clearly exposed and, as word, object and meaning change, are sometimes lost. This volume informs about major sources leading to legal semiotics as we know it today. The need for the exposure of semiotic sources is particularly acute because there were two names for the unfolding of semiotics in law and legal discourse at least until the second half of the 20th century: signifi cs and semiotics , both of which covered a lawyer’s focus on sign and meaning in law. “We never come to thoughts. They come to us. That is the proper hour of discourse”, Heidegger suggested. 1 The texts of this book form the gateways to that “hour of discourse.” Gateways require portals. And thus the construction of this text—not merely a reader, splattered with a mosaic of the writings of others—is meant to be understood as a puzzle whose assemblage is to be teased into some sort of artifi cial order by the reader to suit her tastes. We have chosen readings with care, and woven them together with a number of editorials . They are offered throughout the text, within and apart from the readings. These should be read like the twining of the threads of fate by the Norns, 2 offering “what was”, “is coming” and “may be” within the Well of Urd beneath the great ash tree, Yggdrasil, that stands at the center of the universe. 3 But that twining is all undertaken in the subjunctive tense. These editorials themselves produce a semiotic text inherently imbued with subjectivity and possibility,