The Multilanguage Complexity of European Law

The contributions presented at the Conference 'Approaching the Multilanguage Complexity of European Law: Methodologies in Comparison' (European University Institute of Florence, 17th November 2006) offer a wide spectrum of analyses and reflections on the multilanguage complexity of European law, drawn from different disciplines as European law, comparative law, legal theory, jurilinguistics, legal translation, and knowledge engineering. The diverse but complementary methodologies emerging within such disciplines need to be integrated for handling legal knowledge in a way which respects the conceptual and linguistic diversity of the existing legal traditions while guaranteeing the unity of European law. An integrated multidisciplinary approach to multilingual legal knowledge can indeed enable European lawyers and policy-makers to better understand each other and to improve their understanding of legal language.