Decoding International Law

Susan Tiefenbrun received her J.D. from New York University Law School, a Ph.D in French literature with distinction from Columbia University, an M.A. in French and a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin where she was Phi Beta Kappa as a junior and graduated Magna Cum Laude. Professor Tiefenbrun is Director of the Center of Global Legal Studies at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and Director of the LL.M. Programs in International Trade and Investment and American Legal Studies for foreign lawyers. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor, by Presidential Decree in 2003. Her special interests are international law, international business transactions, international intellectual property, international human rights law, and law and literature. She has written a book-length study of Soviet laws and Eastern European joint venture laws, numerous articles on international intellectual property and piracy, international human rights, as well as global sex trafficking.She is currently writing two books involving women's human rights laws and tax-free trade zones in the world and in the United States. She is President of the Law & Humanities Institute West-coast Branch. She founded two international law study abroad programs in France eighteen years ago and in China four years ago and continues to direct them both each summer. Professor Tiefenbrun speaks ten foreign languages.

• Acknowledgments ; PART A: INTRODUCTION TO SEMIOTICS AND THE LAW ; Introduction ; Chapter 1. Legal Semiotics ; PART B: TERRORISM ; Chapter 2. A Semiotic Approach to a Legal Definition of Terrorism ; Chapter 3. State-Sponsored Terrorism, the Laws of War, and the Role of Story-Telling as a Self-Help Remedy: Law, Literature and Semiotics ; PART C: CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE ; Chapter 4. Deconstructing nullCivil Disobediencenull: A Semiotic Definition ; Chapter 5. Semiotics and Martin Luther King's nullLetter from Birmingham Jailnull ; Chapter 6. On Civil Disobedience, Jurisprudence, Feminism and the Law in the Antigones of Sophocles and Anouilh ; PART D: WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS ; Chapter 7. The Semiotics of Women's Human Rights in Iran ; Chapter 8. Gendercide and the Cultural Context of Sex Trafficking in China ; PART E: CHILDREN'S HUMAN RIGHTS ; Chapter 9. The Culture of Violence: Child Soldiers, Slavery and the Trafficking of Children ; PART F: CULTURE AND SEMIOTICS ; Chapter 10. The Japanese Culture and Copyright Infringement, Defamation, and Sex Trafficking: A Study of the Fictional Life of a Geisha ; Chapter 11. The Impact of Culture on the Semiotics of Treaty Interpretation: How Pirates Read and Misread the Berne Convention

The entire book features eloquent writing (except of course when assembling laws and international conventions for evidence), explicit introductions and conclusions, and a merciful absence of the jargon that makes much semiotic writing both incomprehensible to all except the initiated and inconsistent with its imperial claim to apply to all aspects of human understanding.