Legal writing can encode hidden agendas and power shifts.

Evidence

De Haan’s journey constitutes one of the more unusual biographies in Jewish history. He was born in Smilde, the Netherlands, in 1881, and raised in Zandaam, where his father was a cantor and melamed, a Jewish religious teacher. De Haan apparently abandoned the traditional (but not rigorously Orthodox) Judaism of his youth, and became interested in Christianity as he pursued his literary aspirations at the fin de siècle. Originally he trained to be a teacher, during which time he married a non-Jewish physician, Johanna van Marseveen, who supported his later university studies. While teaching he embarked on a successful career in journalism and the law. As a legal scholar he is recognised for pioneering the application of semiotics to the law. He demonstrated that legal writing and thinking often contained (and obscured) hidden agendas, and altered power relations in ways not explicitly expressed. De Haan became involved in Social Democratic politics, but his writing made him controversial and a liability to his party. He authored novels explicitly depicting homosexuality, including scenes of men with naive young boys. In 1904 his first novel, Pijpelijntjes, unleashed a scandal. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 449

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces De Haan’s pioneering ‘semiotics of the law’ — legal texts as carriers of hidden agendas and power relations.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the specific semiotic legal theory De Haan pioneered and whether it influenced later critical legal studies.
• SHARE: A Dutch 1904 novel titled ‘Pipelines’ that is a pun on fellatio, written by a children’s columnist and schoolteacher he was fired from both jobs for — a specific friend interested in literary scandals would enjoy this.
• XREF: connects to: Hidden legal structures quietly lock in existing social and economic conditions — Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law: An Introduction, 1340; Formal written jury instructions became opaque to the juries they supposedly guided. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2316; Drafters concealed sweeping powers behind innocuous-sounding definitions. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 776