Comparative Law and Language

Editorial

2023-06-24T16:37:06+00:00

Editorial to the first issue

Gender-Neutral Language in Philippine Supreme Court Decisions

2023-04-07T06:56:59+00:00

The language that courts employ is vital in the development of law and society. In the modern-age of gender consciousness, it is critical to recognize the role that language plays in gender dynamics and to deviate from the use of gender-specific (mostly, masculine) language that further perpetrates inequality and marginalization. In the Philippines, both Filipino and English are recognized as official languages. While Filipinp is a predominantly gender-neutral language, English still employs gender-specific language. Yet, English remains to be the principal language used in court proceedings and processes. In so doing, the legal system has, whether consciously or not, embraced the use of gendered language common in the English language. On 15 February 2022, the Philippine Supreme Court promulgated the “Guidelines on the Use of Gender Fair Language in the Judiciary and Gender-Fair Courtroom Etiquette” which seeks to provide a uniform rule with regard to the use of gender-neutral language in court processes and documents. The paper seeks to examine the use of “gendered” language in Philippine case law and the impact, if any, of the Guidelines to Supreme Court decisions after its issuance.

From 'Good family father' to 'reasonable person'

2023-04-29T06:01:44+00:00

Gender-inclusive language is becoming increasingly important in legislation. In many countries, particularly within the European Union and the Commonwealth, there is a growing tendency for substituting gendered language structures with gender-inclusive ones in legislative texts. However, a gendered, and in particular masculine, language use remains the norm in these legal systems, with many legal scholars even doubting the positive effects attributed to gender-inclusive language. Consequently, it is important that within the fields of linguistics, legal and gender studies the various benefits and challenges of gender-inclusive language are properly weighed out against each other. To this end, this paper aims, on the one hand, to provide a comprehensive overview of (i) the principles and strategies of gender-inclusive language use, and (ii) the extent to which this gender-inclusive language is used in legislation and which benefits/problems have been formulated by previous literature. On the other hand, we consider durability as an additional argument in favour of using gender-inclusive language strategies in legislation. Departing from linguistic theory about language norms and the optimisation of specialised communication, we will illustrate how a too conservative language policy in legislation might lead to legislative language becoming an archaic language register. This means that legislative language will grow more and more distant from the language use in other communicative settings, as well as the standard language norm, in which we assume gender-inclusive strategies will keep gaining ground. This archaisation, in turn, might create the possibility that jurists will turn to more hybrid registers for other legal settings and text genres, in particular when less institutionalised settings, spoken communication and communication with lay persons are involved, thus leading to the fragmentation of legal language. Therefore, we will argue that by (i) implementing a sufficient amount of gender-inclusive language in the law and (ii) setting out clear guidelines on which gender-inclusive strategies should be employed, legislative language can become more time-resistant and user-friendly (= durable). Furthermore, we will point out how such durability is expected to have secondary positive effects regarding (a) the endorsement of legislative texts by the public, (b) the learnability of legal language and, by extension, the law, (c) clarity, and (d) the correspondence of various provisions with social reality.

Droit comparé vs droit comparé appliqué à la traduction

2023-02-26T09:49:20+00:00

Dans cet article, nous nous proposons d’explorer les liens entre le droit comparé et la traduction juridique. Nous sommes conscients que le traducteur, à partir du moment où il travaille avec des textes juridiques, doit réaliser un exercice de droit comparé afin de pouvoir proposer des solutions traductologiques adaptées au contexte en question. De même, pour pouvoir étudier les droits étrangers, le juriste comparatiste doit s’appuyer sur la traduction, celle-ci lui permettant de comprendre les concepts étrangers et, par conséquent, d’analyser les similitudes et les différences qui feront possible de tirer des conclusions pour son étude. Cependant, malgré la proximité entre les deux disciplines, la traductologie et le droit comparé, il convient de se demander si le droit comparé réalisé par le comparatiste et par le traducteur sont différents.
Convaincus qu’il ne s’agit pas du même exercice, malgré les similitudes, l’objectif principal de notre étude est de réfléchir sur les différences entre le droit comparé et le droit comparé appliqué à la traduction. Pour ce faire, nous structurons notre travail en deux grands blocs : le premier se concentre sur la relation entre le droit comparé et la traduction et le second se focalise davantage sur le point de vue du traducteur juridique et sur la manière dont ce professionnel devient un comparatiste particulier, qui le différencie du juriste traditionnel, pour réaliser la traduction de textes juridiques. Enfin, nous terminons notre travail par les réflexions finales auxquelles nous sommes parvenus après avoir réalisé notre étude.

The Role of Legal Transfer in Post-Communist Poland

2023-03-15T15:34:53+00:00

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 marked the symbolic end of socialism. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the socialist system meant that the legal system in force had to be rebuilt. The purpose of this article is to deal with the role of legal transfer in this transitional period using the example of the change of the property regime in Poland. This question is embedded in the search for an appropriate metaphor for this unprecedented process.

The article elaborates on how Poland has managed the transformation of the property regime. This elaboration is oriented to the central question of the role of legal transfer.

The theories of Watson, Legrand, Frankenberg and Foljanty are used to characterize the transformation process in terms of legal theory. This is aimed at providing an optimal metaphor for the post-communist transformation of the Polish legal system. The central issue here is transfer in all its facets. The transfer is not only considered in the form of translation in the sense of a technical translation of a norm from one language into another, but also with regard to cultural differences and a possible change in meaning as a result of the transfer. In this respect, the object of research is the translation process as such, but also the continued existence of the norms at issue in the new legal order.

The Use of the Present tense in legal trilingual discourse

2023-03-05T19:36:25+00:00

The main purpose of this article is to show the two interpretations of the present tense in a legal context in English, French, and Russian. These are the constative and deontic senses. Secondly, this paper analyses, from a contrastive perspective, the linguistic properties of the three forms used in the three languages, in order to express the constative and deontic senses of the present tense in legal discourse. These are Present Simple in English, the Indicative form of the present in French, and the imperfective Present tense in Russian.

Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law

2023-06-21T10:10:17+00:00

The present contribution outlines the content of the panel "Comparative Law and Methodology" held within the context of the Roundtable on Law and Semiotics, from May 24th to 27th, at the Antonianum Auditorium. In short, the aim was to present the contents of the individual presentations, with a particular emphasis on the state of the art of comparative methodology in legal science and its potential developments. In a globalized and dynamic context, both from a legal and economic and social perspective, comparative methodology appears as an efficient tool in managing such changes.