Legal Discourse Between Semiotic Rigor and Media Excesses: Towards a Rehabilitation of Legal Language

Legal discourse constitutes an autopoietic semiotic system, founded on a terminological and pragmatic rigor unparalleled in other registers of language. Through an approach combining legal semiotics and discourse analysis, this article examines the three dimensions (locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary) of the normative utterance, drawing on Austin and Searle's speech act theories, extended by Grzegorczyk in the legal field, as well as on the notion of normative closure developed by Luhmann and Teubner to define the legal system as autopoietic. To empirically ground this reflection, the analysis utilizes a comparative corpus in French, combining discursive configurations from the Moroccan legal system with examples drawn from the Francophone media landscape. The study then analyzes the distortions that legal discourse undergoes in the media, particularly in the handling of criminal cases where the presumption of innocence, guaranteed by Articles 23 and 119 of the 2011 Moroccan Constitution and by Article 1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, is undermined by terminological shifts that conflate suspicion and guilt. Finally, the article theorizes the notion of ignorantia juris as a major semiotic problem; the normative closure of legal language creates a structural cognitive distance with its lay audience, which media discourse exploits by producing simplifications with potentially devastating normative effects. The study thus argues for a rehabilitation of legal language, understood not as a weakening of its technicality, but as a revaluation of its intelligibility and the fundamental guarantees it protects.