Giuffré Editore

The legal language of EU civil law

Elena Ioriatti

Professor of Comparative Law, Trento University, Faculty of Law (Italy)


The Chapter will introduce the reader of the Handbook to the EU legal language, explained from a legal, rather than a linguistic point of view.

The knowledge of how the multilingual legal language of the EU is formulated and the meanings of few legal concepts of the three Regulations will be analysis in this section of the Handbook, as part of the educational aim of EuLawInEnglish project: the training on EU legal language, in particular, is important because EU norms are composed by concepts that have to be interpreted and applied by the national jurists and operators in the Member States.

The explanation of EU legal language and terminology will be accompanied by examples, so as to enable professionals to understand the difference between the European neologisms (new EU concepts) and the national ones. This subject will be briefly analysed from the cornerstone of the method of comparative law too, as some specific tools of this science are very useful to understand and apply the EU norms at the national level.

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