Resumen de Triumph of Law over Language: Case Studies on Multilingually Negotiated EU-Law
Peter Schiffauer, Izabela Jedrzejowska Schiffauer
Increased consciousness of the functioning of language and legal reasoning, together with a tendency followed by legislating bodies to spell out in the utmost detail the normative programme of the adopted provisions, have created an illusion of a stricter binding of administrative authorities and the judiciary by the very “wording” of democratically legitimate normative texts. The authors refute the hypothesis that the functioning of the legal system is effectively limited by the wording of legal provisions and demonstrate its fallacy on the basis of case studies of multilingual EU law. The uniform application of the latter is only possible where the judicial interpretation and reasoning find extra-textual tools to deal with vagueness and ambiguity of thetransnationally negotiated law and the divergences in its multilingual, but equally authentic language versions.
