Jef I. Richards
University of Texas at Austin

Clarke L. Caywood
Northwestern University

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 exten-
sively 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 advertis-
ing, visual or verbal, our discussion focuses primarily on the visual and
structural features of these ads.

Although judges and many legislators have legal training and are adept
at gleaning the ambiguities and multiple meanings inherent in words,
they are inexperienced at dealing with nonverbal communications, as
represented in legal decisions dealing with pictorial expressions ( Rich-
ards, 1986; Richards & Zakia, 1981). Although there are instances where
the law has acknowledged a citizen's right to communicate without
words, such as burning a draft card ( United States v. O'Brien, 1968) or a
flag ( Texas v. Johnson, 1989) in protest, courts have found it difficult
deciding how to handle most instances of nonverbal expression. For
example, where a detailed semiotic analysis of pictures (or even cuts,

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