The prevalence of visual representations of legal ideas in accounts of the “Common Core of European Law” at Trento (Italy) serves to fix lawyers' attention on law-as-shape rather than law-as-word, as the shape or representation explains the legal idea in a way that words alone cannot. This recognition of the viability of non-verbal communication in law suggests that Trento scholars view the law of the common core, notwithstanding the choice of English for its language of expression, as fundamentally meta-linguistic. Indeed the Trento project, which involves scholars who typically work in the broad range of languages most generally associated with the formal expression of their own national law, appears to have adopted the idea that law has no necessary relationship with the words or the language ordinarily used to give it expression as a working postulate. The dynamic established between law and language at Trento demonstrates — obliquely but assuredly — that law and language can be disconnected: that the common law tradition, for example, has no natural or necessary relationship with English that confines it to that language any more than the civil law in the French tradition is bound up in some hexagonal linguistic form or Parisian idiom. Moreover it should also ground the view that the law of the common core — assuming such a category exists — belongs to all the languages of Europe and to none of them.