Law as a symbolic order
some concluding remarks
pp. 289-297
in: Bart van Klink, Britta van Beers, Lonneke Poort (eds), Symbolic legislation theory and developments in biolaw, Berlin, Springer, 2016Abstract
The idea that the legal order can also be understood as a symbolic order has been explored in this volume from various disciplinary perspectives, ranging from symbolic legislation theory to bioethics, from biolaw to EU law, and from sociology to anthropology. In the contributions to part I of this volume various aspects of the general theory of symbolic legislation were discussed. Subsequentely, in parts II and III, the symbolic dimensions of law were analyzed and examined in an area of law in which the notion of the symbolic has acquired a central role: biolaw. In these concluding remarks, we offer a reflection on how the notion of the symbolic has been discussed and developed in the various contributions to this volume. Our aim is to bring together the volume's first theoretical part with the subsequent two more applied parts on biolaw.