Language and Doctrinal Reception in Law

Abstract

The capacity for legal thinking is closely linked to a person’s gift for languages. This is due to the fact that the norms of a legal order are formulated in the ordinary language of a specific country. On top of this ordinary language, a legal community is usually creating a specialized language, in the form of a doctrinal discourse on the legal order in question. Such specialized languages may even have a two-tier structure, consisting not only of the object level of doctrinal studies, but also of a certain theory of law serving as a meta-level.Legal doctrine seen as a language is not easily embraced, but needs a certain socialisation into the forms of living and communication of a given community, which presupposes a rather long educational process.Suppose, as a thought experiment, a Uniform Highway Code, which is applied by lawyers belonging to different language communities. Are they really applying the same code? Suppose further that the law of the European Union maybe considered as a uniform law. Is the supposition correct that we are confronted with a uniform law, uniformly applied by lawyers of the Member States? Would that indicate the emergence of a common European legal language, gradually influencing the national doctrinal discourses? Will, under the influence of this development, lawyers be inclined to function more and more in the way of Google-like search engines, operating on a heap of rules, or rather stick to the traditional structuring approach, with the aim of transforming a set of rules into a doctrinal system?