Law, Language and Multilingualism in Europe: The Call for a New Legal Culture

Although there is still a tendency in Europe to succumb to general ideas about the relationship between language and the law that obscure the complex nature of the process leading to the application of legal rules, multilingual legislation displaces theories about the relationship between law and language which rely on those ideas. Multilingual legislation invites to understand how (and under which conditions) normative texts drafted in different languages can result in convergent interpretative practices. Multilingual legislation thus opens the way to an understanding of law that invites less unthinking reliance on the normative virtues of texts as such, placing more attention on the normative forces and communicative practices underlying the development of the law across Europe.