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14 Int'l J. Semiotics L. v (2001)

handle is hein.journals/intjsemi14 and id is 1 raw text is: ANNA PINTORE CO-EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION This special issue of the International Journal for Legal Semiotics is dedicated to the Italian discussion on fundamental rights. The issue is certainly a hot one: after all, to paraphrase the title of a book by Norberto Bobbio, we live in the 'age of rights'. In fact, the concept of right, and of fundamental right, does pervade the theories and arguments expounded nowadays by lawyers and by legal, moral and political philosophers, as well as everyday political and moral claims. Unfortunately, the concept's evocative capacity is inversely proportional to its univocacy. What do we actually mean when we talk about a 'fundamental right'? And which rights should we consider to be fundamental? Is it possible to identify an unequi- vocal, rigorous concept of fundamental right that would provide us with a tool that can be useful to legal theory and political theory? Or must we resign ourselves to considering the concept to be no more than a persuasive weapon in the armament of political rhetoric, an irremediably confused, proteiform notion whose sole function is to provide any ethical-political opinion with a licence of rectitude and propriety? These questions call for a semiotic analysis as well as for a reassessment of the concept of fundamental right on the legal ethical and political plane. The essay by Luigi Ferrajoli that opens this issue aims precisely at such an analysis and reassessment. Ferrajoli's essay constitutes a truly conspicuous and, to the best of my knowledge, unprecedented attempt to produce a general theory of fundamental rights, to undertake a suitable redefinition of the concept of fundamental right, in order to make it into a technical concept of the general theory of law, on a par with other concepts, such as norm, duty, sanction etc. (it is no coincidence that the essay by Ferrajoli translated here is part of a more far-reaching work of axiomatised theory of law). The essay therefore takes the form of an exercise in the analytical theory of law: not in political philosophy, nor in legal doctrine. It follows that it does not deal with the problem of the moral foundations of funda- mental rights, which belongs to the sphere of the political philosopher; nor does it tackle the problem of determining which fundamental rights actually exist in a given legal order, which belongs to the sphere of the lawyer. L International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 14: v-x, 2001. O © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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