Private Law Theory

ABSTRACT
This article proposes a semiotic theory of private international law. It does not seek to replace the traditional doctrinal categories of the field — conflict rules, characterization, ascertainment of foreign law, recognition of foreign judgments, public policy, and adaptation — but reinterprets them as operations with legal signs, codes, and meanings. The methodological basis of the article is formed by Louis Hjelmslev’s glossematics, Roland Barthes’s semiology, Berger and Luckmann’s theory of the social construction of reality, and John Searle’s theory of institutional facts. The central argument is that law functions, in relation to ordinary language and social reality, as a secondary signifying system: it transforms social meanings into legal categories. Private international law operates at a further level. It deals not with raw social facts, but with legal meanings already produced by other legal systems. In this sense, private international law is a metasemiotic mechanism: it makes foreign legal systems, institutions, norms, statuses, and judgments the content of its own legal operations. A conflict rule is therefore not merely a technical rule selecting the applicable law, but an operator of metasemiotic reference. Characterization becomes the primary act of legal translation, while recognition of foreign judgments appears as the conversion of a foreign act of legal meaning-production into a domestic legal effect. The article demonstrates this approach through examples such as contractual penalties, judicial coercive remedies, foreign judgments, public policy, and the boundary between legal systems. It concludes that private international law should be understood as a law of legal translation between legal worlds: a tertiary code that coordinates, adapts, translates, and sometimes refuses foreign legal meanings. This semiotic perspective reveals private international law not as a peripheral technical discipline, but as one of the fields in which the signifying nature of law becomes most visible.

Kolobov, Roman, Private International Law as Metasemiotic Translation: Legal Sign Systems, Boundary, and the Transgression of Legal Meanings (May 13, 2026).