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In an era marked by processes of economic, political and legal integration that are arguably unprecedented in their range and impact, the translation of law has assumed a significance which it would be hard to overstate. The following situations are typical. A French law school is teaching French law in the English language to foreign exchange students. Some US legal scholars are exploring the possibility of developing a generic or transnational constitutional law. German judges are referring to foreign law in a criminal case involving an honour killing committed in Germany with a view to ascertaining the relevance of religious prescriptions. European lawyers are actively working on the crea...
In an era marked by processes of economic and political integration that are arguably unprecedented in their range and impact, the translation of law has assumed a new significance. Can legal rules carry identical normative implications in more than one language? Can law achieve uniformity despite needing to be rendered in many languages? How do interpreting and translation affect adjudication in a multilingual courtroom? To what extent can a given legal text make sense in a different legal culture? These questions, among others, are addressed here within a comparative legal context in which, it is demonstrated, translation issues are a central feature of the contemporary legal landscape.
Bringing together leading academics hailing from different cultural and scholarly horizons, this book revisits legal hermeneutics by making particular reference to philosophy, sociology and linguistics. On the assumption that theory has much to teach law, that theory motivates and enables, the writings of such intellectuals as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, Giorgio Agamben, Jürgen Habermas, Ronald Dworkin and Ludwig Wittgenstein receive special consideration. As it explores the matter of reading the law and as it inquires into the emergence of meaning within the dynamic between reader and text against the background of the reader’s worldly finiteness, this collection of essays wishes to contribute to an improved appreciation of the merits and limits of law’s hermeneutics which, it argues, is emphatically not to be reduced to a simple tool for textual exegesis.
Over the past decades, the field commonly known as comparative law has significantly expanded. The multiplication of journals, the proliferation of scholarship and the creation of courses or summer schools specifically devoted to comparative law attest to its increasing popularity. Within the Western legal tradition, a traditional, black-letter approach to law has proved particularly authoritative. This co-authored book rethinks comparative law’s mainstream model by providing both students and lawyers with the intellectual equipment allowing them to approach any foreign law in a more meaningful way.
Presenting a critique of conventional methods in comparative law, this book argues that, for comparative law to qualify as a discipline, comparatists must reflect on how and why they make comparisons. Günter Frankenberg discusses not only methods and theories, but also the ethical implications and the politics of comparative law in bringing out the different dimensions of the discipline. Comparative Law as Critique offers various approaches that turn against the academic discourse of comparative law, including analysis of a widespread spirit of innocence in terms of method, and critique of human rights narratives. It also examines how courts negotiate differences between cases regarding Muslim veiling. The incisive critiques and comparisons in this book will be of essential reading for comparatists working in legal education and research, as well as students of comparative law and scholars in comparative anthropology and social sciences.
Drawing on historical, normative, theoretical, and economic methodologies, Pier Giuseppe Monateri offers a fresh critical analysis of various dimensions of comparative law methods. Comprehensive and engaging with a multidisciplinary approach, this Advanced Introduction spans the fields of comparative legal studies, law and finance and global law.
The chapters constituting this volume focus on legal language seen from cross-cultural perspectives, a topic which brings together two areas of research that have burgeoned in recent years, i.e. legal linguistics and intercultural studies, reflecting the rapidly changing, multifaceted world in which legal institutions and cultural/national identities interact. Within the broad thematic leitmotif of this volume, it has been possible to identify two major strands: legal discourse across languages on the one hand, and legal discourse across cultures on the other. Of course, labels of this kind are adopted partly as a matter of convenience, and it could be argued that any paper dealing with legal discourse across languages inevitably has to do with legal discourse across cultures. But a closer inspection of the papers comprising each of these two strands reveals that there is a coherent logic behind the choice of labels. All seven chapters in the first section are concerned with legal topics where more than one language is at stake, whereas all seven chapters in the second section are concerned with legal topics where cultural differences are brought to the fore.
Comparative law is a common subject-matter of research and teaching in many universities around the world, and the twenty-first century has aptly been termed 'the era of comparative law'. This Cambridge Handbook of Comparative Law presents a truly global perspective of comparative law today. The contributors are drawn from all parts of the world to provide different perspectives on how we understand the 'law' and how it operates in practice. In substance, the Handbook contains 36 chapters covering a broad range of topics, divided under the following headings: 'Methods of Comparative Law' (Part I), 'Legal Families and Geographical Comparisons' (Part II), 'Central Themes in Comparative Law' (Part III); and 'Comparative Law beyond the State' (Part IV).
This edited volume documents the state of the art in research on translation policies in legal and institutional settings. Offering case studies of past and present translation policies from several parts of the world, it allows for a compelling comparison of attitudes towards translation in varying contexts. The book highlights the virtues of integrating different types of expertise in the study of translation policy: theoretical and applied; historical and modern; legal, institutional and political. It effectively illustrates how a multidisciplinary perspective furthers our understanding of translation policies and unveils their intrinsic link with topics such as multilingualism, linguistic justice, minority rights, and citizenship. In this way, each contribution sheds new light on the role of translation in the everyday interaction between governments and multilingual populations.
A new perspective on how far law's power derives from socially situated communication rather than from abstract rules.