Legal terms have a special status at the interface between language and law. Adopting the general framework developed by Jackendoff and the concepts competence and performance as developed by Chomsky, it is shown that legal terms cannot be fully accounted for unless we set up a category of abstract objects. This idea corresponds largely to the classical view of terminology, which has been confronted with some challenges recently. It is shown that for legal terms, arguments against abstract (...) objects are not pertinent. As abstract objects are not natural, it is important to consider their creation. Two types of creation are distinguished and illustrated, one for new concepts and one for terms corresponding to existing general language concepts. In the latter case, it is important for the abstract object to remain close enough to the intuitive prototype. At the same time, legal terms as abstract objects are shown to have a natural place in relation to legal theory. (shrink)

Although legal terms are conventionally considered to have self-referential, self-closed meaning independent of context, a legal term only acquires its meaning within a given context. As long as the context varies, the meaning of the same legal term as a signifier may change correspondingly. Based on case studies by applying semiotics, we argue that a legal term is just a sign within its sign system; a legal term as an individual sign (...) does not have any inherent meaning, and its meaning can only exist in the relationship with other signs or sign systems. In other words, a legal term only denotes in a particular temporal and spatial context. Through this study, we conclude four propositions about a legal term as a sign: first, the connection of a legal term with a legal concept is relatively arbitrary; second, the meaning of a legal term exists in a sign system; third, a legal term can be subject to multiple interpretations; fourth, the defining of a legal term may be affected by other sign systems. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric Jahrgang: 45 Heft: 1 Seiten: 161-174.

This study aims to identify challenges related to the quality of legal terms translated from Arabic to English in laws pertaining to children in five countries in the Middle East and North Africa region: Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. The terms describe children’s behaviors that are considered legally and socially unacceptable and adult behaviors that violate laws meant to protect children’s rights in both domestic and foreign contexts. Using a blend of analytical and descriptive (...) methodologies, along with comparative legal research tools and critical discourse analysis, an analytical model called CCFND was developed. This model identifies three primary standards for evaluating translation quality, each with specific criteria for consistency, coherence, and general notes cover features, non-detrimental errors, and detrimental errors. The analysis of 72 legal terms revealed that the translation quality was high, with an equivalence rate of 93.29% for the standard of consistency, a slightly higher rate of 97.92% for the standard of coherence, and a standard equivalence rate along with eight features, one non-detrimental error, and seven detrimental errors. These findings indicate that using various strategies, the translations effectively gained high quality in rendering the terms from Arabic to English. It is suggested that the King Salman Global Academy for the Arabic Language should develop a bilingual contextual dictionary of effective legal translation strategies for terms and phrases related to children in both national and international laws. (shrink)

The legal industry is characterized by the presence of dense and complex documents, which necessitate automatic processing methods to manage and analyse large volumes of data. Traditional methods for extracting legal information depend heavily on substantial quantities of annotated data during the training phase. However, a question arises on how to extract information effectively in contexts that do not favour the utilization of annotated data. This study investigates the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) as a transformative solution (...) for the extraction of legal terms, presenting a novel approach to overcome the constraints associated with the need for extensive annotated datasets. Our research delved into methods such as prompt-engineering and fine-tuning to enhance their performance. We evaluated and compared, to a rule-based and BERT systems, the performance of four LLMs: GPT-4, Miqu-1-70b, Mixtral-8x7b, and Mistral-7b, within the scope of limited annotated data availability. We implemented and assessed our methodologies using Luxembourg’s traffic regulations as a case study. Our findings underscore the capacity of LLMs to successfully deal with legal terms extraction, emphasizing the benefits of one-shot and zero-shot learning capabilities in reducing reliance on annotated data by reaching 0.690 F1 Score. Moreover, our study sheds light on the optimal practices for employing LLMs in the processing of legal information, offering insights into the challenges and limitations, including issues related to terms boundary extraction. (shrink)

Legal translation between English and Arabic is under researched. However, the growing need for it, due to immigration and asylum seeking, among other reasons, necessitates the importance of more research. The asymmetry between English and Arabic poses many difficulties for legal translators, be they linguistic-based, culture-specific or system-based. The aim of this research is to discuss ways of translating lexical items between English and Arabic. In this current discussion I will present, exemplify and analyse the common difficult areas (...) of translating English/Arabic legal texts and suggest ways of dealing with them. These areas involve culture-specific and system-based terms, archaic terms, specialised terms and doublets and triplets. With this aim in mind, the paper answers the following research questions: 1.What are the common difficulties of translating legal texts between English and Arabic? 2.What are the common lexical difficulties between English and Arabic legal texts? 3.What are the procedures of translating lexical legal terms between English and Arabic? The paper concludes that translating the above-mentioned lexical terms requires expertise, professional training, robust knowledge of the linguistic and legal systems of languages, as well as up-to-date electronic dictionaries and well-defined parallel corpora. (shrink)

It may be affirmed with some confidence that on this topic no generally accepted solution will be found in default of new evidence, for which we can only faintly hope. Against certainty on the matter it would seem that the Everlasting has fixed his canon: quis iustius induit arma scire nefas. Dogmatism is out of place; we must be content with whatever theory is least difficult to reconcile with the texts and with a reasonable interpretation of the course of events (...) at the time and the comments on them of contemporary observers. The thesis advanced in this paper is that there are strong reasons for supposing that the Lex Pompeia Licinia contained a date by which Caesar's command ended, that this date was not the end of February of the year 50 or the year 49 or the end of December of the year 50, that it did not contain a clause forbidding the discussion of a successor to Caesar before March 1, 50, and that if the date ending his command lies between the end of February and the end of December of the year 50, it may have been in fact the Ides of November in that year. (shrink)

Legal terms, such as “ownership,”“contract,”“validity,”“negligence,” are used as middle terms in legal deduction. The paper distinguishes two problems regarding this use. One is the logical function of terms for deduction within a normative system. Specific problems dealt with in this connection are meaning, definition, and economy of expression. The other problem connected with middle terms is the “moulding” and possible manipulation of the meaning of legal terms, for arriving at desired conclusions in a given scheme of inference. (...) It is indicated how the moulding of contested legal concepts, if not restricted, will obscure the ratio of legal rules. This problem is relevant, inter alia, to arguments ex analogia in the law. (shrink)

From the perspectives of foreign-Chinese bilingual law dictionaries, Chinese-foreign bilingual law dictionaries, and monolingual Chinese law dictionaries, this paper reviews the compilation and publication of law dictionaries in China over the past six decades following the founding of New China in 1949, especially over the past three decades after the policy of reform and opening up was adopted in 1978. This paper reevaluates the translated legal terms covered and defined in the Legal Dictionary of the Soviet Union, Law (...) Dictionary, Oxford Large Dictionary of Law, Chinese-English Glossary of Terms of Laws and Regulations of People’s Republic of China and English-Chinese Dictionary of Anglo-American Law to analyze the roles of law dictionaries on the standardization of the translated Chinese legal terms. (shrink)

Legal translation is viewed as “a category in its own right” (Weston in An English reader’s guide to the French legal system. Berg, Oxford, (1991, p. 2). It is a kind of translation of the language used for specific purposes (Zhao in J Transl Stud 4:28, 2000). Legal translation requires accuracy in relaying the substance of the message, while respecting the form thereof as well as the genius of the target language (Zhao in J Transl Stud 4:19, (...) 2000; Sarcevic in New approach to legal translation. Kluwer Law International, Hague, 1997, p. 52). As generally accepted worldwide, precision is deemed of paramount importance in legal translation. With this in mind, the present paper deals chiefly with the concept of how legal translation can correctly be tested in order to ensure precision and validity for application and implementation. The paper will argue that the main goal of legal translation and the major criterion against which the precision of legal translation should be tested is to reproduce the same legal effect in the target text as that conveyed in the source text regardless of the method(s) used in the translation process. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary notion picture of the world makes research works devoted to this area of studies challenging from the point of view of finding interconnections between linguistic and extra-linguistic factors in the process of structuring categories of words, including those functioning in terminological systems and subsystems. Legal pictures of the world are specific cultural phenomena that may differ in various countries due to the nationally specific features of law and legal culture development. One of the most complicated problems (...) of representing specific knowledge through linguistic, terminological, signifiers is the problem of linguistic categorization of concepts. The article considers the problem of forming legal categories based on word-building suffixes from the point of view of the development of the legal language ‘picture of the world’ [reflection of the world] closely associated with its conceptual picture. The conclusion is drawn that commonly used derivational suffixes transform their meanings in accordance with the legal taxonomies, forming the conceptual legal picture of the world. The results of theoretical studies in terminological conceptualization may be used in teaching legal English vocabulary in the form of systematic presentation of term-building patterns expressing certain conceptual categories. (shrink)

In this work we study, design, and evaluate computational methods to support interpretation of statutory terms. We propose a novel task of discovering sentences for argumentation about the meaning of statutory terms. The task models the analysis of past treatment of statutory terms, an exercise lawyers routinely perform using a combination of manual and computational approaches. We treat the discovery of sentences as a special case of ad hoc document retrieval. The specifics include retrieval of short texts, specialized document types, (...) and, above all, the unique definition of document relevance provided in detailed annotation guidelines. To support our experiments we assembled a data set comprising 42 queries which we plan to release to the public in the near future in order to support further research. Most importantly, we investigate the feasibility of developing a system that responds to a query with a list of sentences that mention the term in a way that is useful for understanding and elaborating its meaning. This is accomplished by a systematic assessment of different features that model the sentences’ usefulness for interpretation. We combine features into a compound measure that accounts for multiple aspects. The definition of the task, the assembly of the data set, and the detailed task analysis provide a solid foundation for employing a learning-to-rank approach. (shrink)

An essential aim of this study is to present principles of the legal interpretation of the term “building structure” for the needs of the imposition of a real estate tax. The analysis of both administrative courts’ judgments and the subject literature indicates lack of consistency in the scope of this term’s meaning. In my opinion, interpretative discrepancies are caused by incorrect legal interpretation of the legal definition. It should be noticed that numerous controversies connected with (...) the legal interpretation of the term building structure are connected with considerable tax burden of this type of building objects. Taxpayers, for obvious reasons, are therefore “interested” in not finding the objects owned by them to be building structures in the meaning of the Tax Law, or possibly in finding only those objects’ specified parts to be building structures. It is easily apparent particularly in the case of objects of complex structures. On the other hand, however, for many municipalities in Poland, income from building structures’ taxation creates municipal budgets. This way the practice of applying local tax law encounters numerous disputes between taxpayers and self-government tax authorities. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to analyze accounting and legal approaches to the definition of the term "accounts receivable" and to justify the need for its clarification to be fixed in regulatory documents. Scientific novelty: the definition of the term "accounts receivable" has been clarified using accounting and legal approaches, where it is proposed to understand the obligations of other legal entities and individuals to this economic entity for contributions to the authorized capital, for (...) advances issued, for bills of exchange receivable, for goods sold, monetary amounts issued under the report, arising on the basis of a law, contract or civil situation. As a result, the updated definition will make it possible to supplement Article 307 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, art. 3 of the Federal Law "On Accounting", Article 7 of the draft Federal Tax Service "Accounts Receivable and Payable ". (shrink)

Following modernization paradigm and some local dynamics conducive to development, some Asian countries emerged as economic tigers in the world. Conversely, other Asian countries including Bangladesh failed to taste economic development despite having monetary and technological aids from some developed nations. Drawing on some social and historical trajectories of the divergent contours of Asian development/ underdevelopment, the paper examines the state of development in Bangladesh. The study has found that Japan is the first country in Asia to achieve modernization, and (...) it was followed by other Asian tigers such as Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and currently China and India. We found that all these Asian tigers exert a developmental model which is characterized by ‘endogenous’ modernity and economic nationalism largely driven by, among other things, long-term economic vision and strong political leadership. While the history of Bangladesh has witnessed various cultural nationalisms, the nation has failed to generate any unified economic nationalism since its independence in 1971. We suggest that Bangladesh needs a long-term development vision—a key thrust for economic nationalism—focusing more on some socioeconomic and legal aspects that have historically become major impediments for development. (shrink)

This paper discusses the legal aspects of the activities of transnational corporations. The relevance of the subject matter is determined by the significant impact exerted by transnational corporations on the world economy in general and on the economic situation of the country in which such corporations are registered as a subject of legal form of ownership in particular. Quality functioning of transnational corporations is an effective factor for the formation of sustainable development. This study reveals and determines the (...) relationship between the scale of activity of transnational corporations and their legal status within the framework of both single countries and entire economic communities, the individual subjects of law of which are transnational corporations. The practical significance of this study lies in the possibility of identifying and stating key aspects that play a significant role in assessing the practical activities of transnational corporations in the context of existing legal law with the ability to use the identified patterns in specific legal practice. The results of this study can be of significant practical importance for employees in the field of legal support for the activities of transnational-scale corporations, who are faced with the need to deeply analyse the legal aspects of the activities of these organisations and provide management of such structures with timely, highquality legal recommendations regarding the correction of the activities of these organisations in the context of the existing legal field. (shrink)

This paper deals with translating legal terminology concerning child maintenance from Polish to Swedish. The analysis covers selected terms regulated in the Polish civil law and their possible Swedish equivalents. The method used is based on the parameterisation of legal terms, which allows the specification of terms by selected parameters, which are understood as mutually exclusive properties. The parameterised equivalents are analysed in the context of various types of recipients. This provides the basis for the choice of appropriate (...) translation strategies. The author also discusses pragmatic equivalents featured in Rikstermbanken, the Swedish national terminological database, and those used in practice. (shrink)

This article probes the usefulness of selected theories from Cognitive Linguistics in the context of statutory interpretation. The presumption of legal language is a well-established rule of statutory construction in Polish legal practice that comes from the internationally recognised theory by Jerzy Wróblewski. It rests on a controversial assumption that there are different levels of generality in legal language (i.e. the language of statutes) and a single term may be given different meanings depending on the level (...) of generality that is referred to. The authors use the notion of basic level categorisation from the cognitive theory of prototypes to explain this mechanism. Legal concepts, not unlike ordinary concepts, form hierarchical taxonomies. A single term may denote concepts that are situated at different levels in different conceptual taxonomies. In the absence of special circumstances, a legal term should be given the meaning that resides at a higher level of categorisation in the respective legal taxonomy. This way, the presumption of legal language is found to be justified on both linguistic and psychological grounds. (shrink)

Not the least noticeable is the fact that the ancient Greek compound euthanasia, formed by Francis Bacon, has retained its original terminological form since it was first used in the 17th century. Among all other controversial ethical issues, however, the conceptual notion of euthanasia categorically evokes rather important controversies. The questions that arise in this context are whether there is a definition, or at least a determination, of the term euthanasia and whether we are aware of its use in (...) scientific discourse, what exactly is euthanasia. The paper offers a terminological elaboration of the term euthanasia in a linguistic, but mainly legal and medical-procedural context, in order to examine the coherence in defining the term between these categories and, consequently, to determine the key determinants of euthanasia according to categorical sections. The key facts stated are the primary determination or the possible definition of the term for any further scientific study of euthanasia as one of the most controversial issues within bioethical doctrine. (shrink)

The article aims to provide a semiotic interpretation of the sign of the Ecclesiastical Court within the legal framework from temporal and spatial perspectives. The starting point of the research is the idea that the history of the Russian Ecclesiastical Court is inextricably linked to the history of Russian society and secular court. Consideration of the pre-revolutionary ecclesiastical and secular law helps us explore principles of the ecclesiastical proceedings and organization, identify contradictions in understanding modern Ecclesiastical Court. Its sign (...) is not only limited to the legal interpretation. In his novel The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky F. M. gave the sign of the Ecclesiastical Court symbolic meaning and, thus, expanded it beyond the existing legal framework. The Ecclesiastical Court is one of the symbols of Russian spirituality which is reflected in the concept of “Russian soul”. Rational elements of the sign of Ecclesiastical Court as well as its sensual and metaphorical components, are analyzed using the category of Truth. Clearly, the Cross is sign-symbol for Christianity. But if applied to the concept of Ecclesiastical Court, the Orthodox Cross becomes a sign-index. As a result, several semantically heterogeneous meanings of the sign of Ecclesiastical Court are revealed and described. (shrink)

Legal interpretations of the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) can and have evolved over time. Interpretation of the statutory term “irreversible” (circulation cannot ever resume) to mean “...

A provision’s legal meaning is thought by many to be a function of its literal meaning. To explain the appearance that lawyers are arguing over a provision’s legal meaning and not just over which outcome would be more prudent or morally preferable, some legal literalists claim that a provision’s literal meaning may be causally, rather than conventionally, determined. I argue, first, that the proposed explanation is inconsistent with common intuitions about legal meaning; second, that explaining (...) class='Hi'>legal disagreement as a function of the causally determined meanings of moral terms requires, but lacks, a causal semantics which is clearly consistent with the scope of moral disagreement. Finally, I suggest that an element of the theory of language invoked by ‘causal’ legal literalists might be better deployed as part of an intentionalist account of legal practice. (shrink)

Memrise is an educational tool available both online and for mobile devices. Memrise uses flashcards and mnemonic techniques to aid in teaching foreign languages and memorizing information from other subjects, e.g. geography, law or mathematics. Memrise courses are created by its users through the process of crowdsourcing; therefore they are tailored to the individual needs of the users and may focus on the specific content of a particular coursebook or classes. The paper will attempt to present possibilities of using memrise (...) in teaching and learning legal English vocabulary during a tertiary course leading to TOLES certificate examination. The paper will look at various types of exercises which facilitate memorizing vocabulary, learning collocations, prepositional phrases, develop the skill of paraphrasing and defining legal terms of art in plain English. Application of the crowdsourcing method enables the learners to participate in the process of the course creation and constitutes for them a supplementary, out of class exposure to the target language. The second part of the paper will discuss the results of the research conducted by the author among her law students. The aim of the research was to investigate the students′ opinions about memrise as a tool which might facilitate individual learning of the specialist language, as well as to assess whether memrise may influence the test results achieved by the students during the legal English course. The paper will contrastively analyse the progress tests results achieved by the students who have used memrise to revise and recycle language material and those who have chosen traditional methods of learning. The research also attempted to address the question whether the students who had been the contributors to the content of memrise courses had performed better in tests than those who had only been the users. (shrink)

The term duty is used in philosophy and law to de scribe the obligation one person owes to another. Yet what these two disciplines mean by duty often differs. Perhaps even more important, a determination by the law that a duty exists has different social consequences than does a similar assessment by philosophy Moral or ethical obligations between individuals make living in society possible, but breach of these obligations usually results only in social opprobrium, personal guilt, or shame. A (...) legal duty, by contrast, enables a person to use the power of the state to enforce claims against another, either by injunction to make the duty-ower fulfill his/her responsibilities or more commonly by award of damages in the event the duty-ower fails to meet these obligations. In some cases, society itself chooses to impose criminal penalties on those who fail to meet certain important obligations.The use of the term duty in both disciplines creates the temptation to extend a definition formulated in one setting to the other discourse. Ronald Green does not bite this apple, but his efforts to draw on the law to support his moral arguments, while not clearly identifying the distinctions between legal and moral obligations, may make it easier for others to see moral and legal duties as the same. Yielding to the enticement to equate moral and legal duties can lead to a host of difficulties. My purpose here is to demonstrate why the duties and privileges proposed by Professor Green are not and should not be adopted and enforced by the law. (shrink)

The productivity gains generated by innovation are the root cause of long-term economic growth. In this paper, two empirical hypotheses are proposed to clarify our view: the trade turnover of technology market and intellectual property protection are important factors to stimulate innovation; The main channel of communication is through the increase of research staff and R&D funds. The empirical research result show that: The greater the technology trade volume, the greater the incentive to regional innovation activities, the greater the (...) number of regional patents; About the intellectual property protection, The higher the protection intensity is, the greater the incentive is to regional innovation activities and the greater the number of regional patents. Different from relevant researches, this paper discusses the decisive role of market activity and legal environment on regional innovation behavior from the perspective of technology trade and patent protection, and emphasizes the theoretical significance of market and legal system from a more general perspective. (shrink)

The study of legal transplants provides a vital critical supplement to mainstream theories about legal change. Legal transplants are not exceptional or isolated occurrences, despite the economic, social, political and cultural barriers that separate the world’s legal systems. This Article goes beyond traditional approaches to the study of transplants by substituting the figurative language of transplants with explicit theory about how legal change is produced. It first provides a brief account of what the literature on (...) legal transplants has achieved so far in terms of "macro" explanations of legal change currently available. It then argues that legal transplants as social acts performed by individuals call for a study of the "micro" level of engagement with legal change by individuals. The key notion that is advanced to explore this dimension is the notion of mediated action, which denotes action that is performed by individuals making use of features of the environment as tools to interact in a specific setting. The notion of mediated action was first introduced in cultural-historical psychological investigations of the social formation of the mind. As social acts, legal transplants represent instances of mediated action. The last part of this Article highlights how legal transplants raise questions of justice and discusses briefly how the new approach to the study of transplants advocated here relates to them. (shrink)

By its central terms, the language of the culture of death sends signals that produce life-accepting associations and at the same time mask its intentions against life. On the one hand, the culture of death includes certain behaviors. On the other hand, it includes those social and legal structures that strive to make killing socially acceptable by camouflaging it as a medical service or a social assistance. The culture of death wants to remove killing from condemnation, so that it (...) is no longer cursed as a crime. In the center of the culture of death is the battle for the legalization of abortion, euthanasia, and embryonic stem cell research. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 14.4 : 647–657. (shrink)

Legal academics are deeply involved in researching legal phenomena. Examining empirical research on legal education reveals a story of increasing sophistication in both the methods and the analysis used in this area. Due to different cultures of academic law, research into legal education finds that it is predominantly found in common law jurisdictions while there is very little research into legal education in civil law jurisdictions. Empirical research on legal education can be divided into (...) three main categories: work on legal pedagogy, work on the legal academy as an institution, and work on the students and staff who populate law school. This article presents research studies to highlight each of these three categories. While the quantity of empirical research in legal education is not great, it is an area that has developed exponentially in recent years in terms of sophistication and rigor. (shrink)

Legal formalism is the foil for many theories of law. Yet formalism remains controversial, meaning that its critics focus on claims that are not central. This paper sets out a view of formalism using a methodology that embraces one of formalism’s most distinct claims, that formalism is a scientific theory of law. This naturalistic view of formalism helps to distinguish two distinct types of formalism, “doctrinal formalism,” the view that judicial behaviour can be represented using rules, and “rule formalism,” (...) the view that judges follow external rules when they are deciding cases. Doctrinal formalism, understood in naturalistic terms, overcomes many of the criticisms that have been levelled at formalism and can also be used to rehabilitate the currently out‐of‐favour “declaratory theory of law.” Doctrinal formalism is also a longstanding view of law, reflecting both what the original formalists thought of law, and what many present‐day doctrinal lawyers seem to believe. The naturalistic methodology is used to show that the main dispute between doctrinal formalism and American legal realism can be explained by a difference of assumptions concerning whether the values of judges are relative to society, or relative to other judges. (shrink)

The article critically analyzes the conservative conception of passive or static human dignity in accordance with which human’s value is seen as value coming from the exterior (from God or from a biological human’s nature), or value seen as existing per se. In opposition to this conception, a conception of active or created dignity is being developed, which aims at treating human’s dignity not like a social relationship, but rather like a person’s individual ability to live properly in the society (...) (participate in barter relations on the ground of equivalence) and using this propriety to create own individual social value (dignity), as a personal contribution towards maintenance of concord and collaboration in the society. (shrink)

Much of contemporary British legal theory has its roots in the tradition of philosophical empiricism—the philosophical position that no theory or opinion can be accepted as valid unless verified by the test of experience. In this context normativity, both in law and morals, is understood and explained in terms of social practices observable in the world. The nineteenth-century jurist John Austin, for example, defined law in terms of a command supported by a sanction and as presupposing the habitual obedience (...) of the bulk of a community to the commands of a sovereign himself not habitually obedient to anyone else. Similarly, Hart's conception of legal obligation, although somewhat more complex, derived from the observation of people's actual practices analyzed in terms of "the internal point of view" crucial to their comprehension of and participation to these practices. It is within this framework that we must consider the distinction between is and ought as used by British positivist theories and which is so essential to positivist jurisprudence. In this respect a chief difference between the British and the Continental traditions in legal theory prevails. This paper aims to re-examine some main themes of contemporary jurisprudence and explore the extent to which contemporary theorists, both British and Continental, have succeeded in developing a theory of law that would create a workable marriage between the two traditions. (shrink)

The author intends to present evolutionary and revolutionary changes in legal terminology. Legal terminology changes as a result of language usage, technological development, political and social changes and even economy reasons. The following research methods have been applied: the terminological analysis of the research material and the analysis of pertinent literature. The research material included legislation from the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada and Australia. The author focuses on terminological changes resulting from social transformations. Selected (...) terms and their transformation in respect to meaning and form are elaborated on in the paper. Finally, the author draws conclusions that translation of such terminology should aim at communication precision and many of them may be false friends in interlingual communication. (shrink)

The article analyses the key issues of the legal status of the sole managing body from the perspective of the valid legal regulation, the established case-law and doctrine. The first part of the article analyses the dualism of the manager’s legal status from the perspective of civil law and labour law. The analysis of the latest case-law presented herein shows that the rule of “internal” and “external” relations between the manager and the company formulated in the case-law (...) is applied differently, and the criterion of distinguishing the manager’s as the subject of the labour law and that of the civil law statuses still remains unclear. The authors of the article are of the view that due to insufficient legal regulation in force rules established by the case-law to regulate the manager’s legal status cannot ensure the required legal certainty. Thus, the reform of the manager’s legal regulation is essential. The second part of the article strives to answer the question what legal regulation models exist and what are the main criteria of quality legal regulation. The comparative analysis of the legal status regulation of the sole managing body allows to determine the main available regulation models of the manager’s legal status and to distinguish their advantages and disadvantages. The authors of the article believe that it is necessary to take regard to other states’ practices regulating the relations at issue, however, while creating such legal regulation, the evaluation of economic, cultural and social peculiarities of Lithuania is also required. In search for the most appropriate model of the manager’s legal status, attention should be drawn to the fact that in some aspects the labour law regime is too restrictive (e.g., shareholders cannot recall the manager, who is on maternal leave, and the manager at interim does not have full authority) and uncoordinated with the doctrine of the companies’ law. Moreover, quite a few questions directly related to the issues of the manager’s authority do not fall or only partially fall into the scope of the labour law. On the other hand, the problem of the manager’s legal status involves a broader scope of points of the companies’ law than the dualism of the manager’s status, and a part of these points has already been regulated by the Law on Companies (the agreement conclusion, termination, removal from the register of legal persons, terms of notice). In regard to this, a question can be raised if it not be better to regulate the issues of the manager’s legal status by the provisions of the Law on Companies and not of the Labour Code. It is proposed to create a specific legal regulation of the companies’ law, which could meet the needs of business and match up to the doctrine of the companies’ law, which is already being applied. (shrink)

Translations of legal contracts into formal specifications that can be used for assisted reasoning are currently gaining considerable attention in AI and law. Yet, the conceptual intricacy of some of the normative notions involved in legal contracts continues to provide significant challenges to formalization; in accordance with this, there is a need for developing general logic frameworks which allow for an appropriate analysis of the fundamental components of a contractual situation. In the present work, we focus on the (...) representation of decisional and operational roles played by possibly distinct contracting parties. We provide a flexible framework, which extends term-modal logic, where such roles can be effectively formalized and emphasized. (shrink)

Access to legal information and, in particular, to legal literature is examined for the creation of a search and retrieval system for Italian legal literature. The design and implementation of services such as integrated access to a wide range of resources are described, with a particular focus on the importance of exploiting metadata assigned to disparate legal material. The integration of structured repositories and Web documents is the main purpose of the system: it is constructed on (...) the basis of a federation system with service provider functions, aiming at creating a centralized index of legal resources. The index is based on a uniform metadata view created for structured data by means of the OAI approach and for Web documents by a machine learning approach, which, in this paper, has been assessed as regards document classification. Semantic searching is a major requirement for legal literature users and a solution based on the exploitation of Dublin Core metadata, as well as the use of legal ontologies and related terms prepared for accessing indexed articles have been implemented. (shrink)

Legal academics are deeply involved in researching legal phenomena. Examining empirical research on legal education reveals a story of increasing sophistication in both the methods and the analysis used in this area. Due to different cultures of academic law, research into legal education finds that it is predominantly found in common law jurisdictions while there is very little research into legal education in civil law jurisdictions. Empirical research on legal education can be divided into (...) three main categories: work on legal pedagogy, work on the legal academy as an institution, and work on the students and staff who populate law school. This article presents research studies to highlight each of these three categories. While the quantity of empirical research in legal education is not great, it is an area that has developed exponentially in recent years in terms of sophistication and rigor. (shrink)

아이리스 영은 개인의 책임을 넘어선 정치적 책임을 주장하면서 법적인 책임 모델과 사회적 연결 모델을 주장하였다. 그런데 이러한 구분은 실증주의 법개념에 근거한 것으로 보인다. 내용의 정당성까지를 고려하는 비실증주의 법개념론은 사회적 연결 모델과 유사하다. 비실증주의 관점의 확장된 법개념은 여성문제에 대한 법적인 책임을 묻고 법판단에서의 젠더정의를 실현하는 데 적합하다. 이 글은 위안부와 같은 여성문제를 해결하기 위하여 아이리스 영이 전제하고 있는 법의 개념을 비판적으로 다루면서 비실증주의 법개념론의 입장에서 사회적 연결 모델을 바탕으로 법적 책임까지 물을 수 있는 방안을 모색하였다.

This article analyses the regulatory handbooks produced by the new regulators for solicitors and barristers, the main legal professions in England and Wales, following the Legal Services Act 2007. It focuses on the new codes of conduct and the 10 high-level regulatory standards that are a feature of each handbook. The article examines the ways in which key interests have been dealt with in the handbooks from the perspective of the historical narratives of the legal professions and (...) their publications, including their previous codes of conduct. It is found that the barristers’ and solicitors’ codes project different ethical orientations towards the supposedly universal ‘standard conception of the lawyer’s role’ based on the principles of neutrality and partisanship. The origins, meaning and significance of the high-level standards are considered. They are found not to reflect the content of the codes of conduct or to communicate cherished elements of the professions’ historical narratives. It is argued that this is problematic in terms of the professional functions of regulation, education and communication. (shrink)

This book develops a general theory of law, inclusive legal positivism, which seeks to remain within the tradition represented by authors such as Austin, Hart, MacCormick, and Raz, while sharing some of the virtues of both classical and modern theories of natural law, as represented by authors such as Aquinas, Fuller, Finnis, and Dworkin. Its central theoretical questions are: Does the existence or content of positive law ever depend on moral considerations? If so, is this fact consistent with (...) class='Hi'>legal positivism? The author shows how inclusive positivism allows one to answer yes to both of these questions. In addition to articulating and defending his own version of legal positivism, which is a refinement and development of the views of H.L.A. Hart as expressed in his classic book The Concept of Law, the author clarifies the terms of current jurisprudential debates about the nature of law. These debates are often clouded by failures to appreciate that different theorists are offering differing kinds of theories and attempting to answer different questions. There is also a failure, principally on the part of Ronald Dworkin, to characterize opposing theories correctly. The clarity of Waluchow's work will help to remove the confusion which has hitherto marred some jurisprudential debate, particularly about Dworkin's work. (shrink)

Similar case analysis (SCA) is an essential topic in legal artificial intelligence, serving as a reference for legal professionals. Most existing works treat SCA as a traditional text classification task and ignore some important legal elements that affect the verdict and case similarity, like legal events, and thus are easily misled by semantic structure. To address this issue, we propose a Legal Event-Context Model named LECM to improve the accuracy and interpretability of SCA based on (...) Chinese legal corpus. The event-context integration mechanism, which is an essential component of the LECM, is proposed to integrate the legal event and context information based on the attention mechanism, enabling legal events to be associated with their corresponding relevant contexts. We introduce an event detection module to obtain the legal event information, which is pre-trained on a legal event detection dataset to avoid labeling events manually. We conduct extensive experiments on two SCA tasks, i.e., similar case matching (SCM) and similar case retrieval (SCR). Compared with baseline models, LECM is validated by about 13% and 11% average improvement in terms of mean average precision and accuracy respectively, for SCR and SCM tasks. These results indicate that LECM effectively utilizes event-context knowledge to enhance SCA performance and its potential application in various legal document analysis tasks. (shrink)

The Stabilization and Association Agreement with the Republic of Kosovo is a new chapter in the new institutional and social functioning because it has direct impact on the citizens’ life in our country. The effects of the agreement are not only in trading but those are multiple effects, since they do touch the political stability, the rule of law, democratic governance, economic development, trade exchange, regional economic cooperation, etc. and therefore the relevance of this agreement should not be seen from (...) a single viewpoint, but rather from a wider perspective and we should dedicate more attention to the direct legal and trading issues. This agreement in the short term will create perspective and hope, in the middle term, it will create political stability, whereas in the long term, it will bring economic development, and genuinely trading exchange. (shrink)

Philosophy, political philosophy and legal philosophy are all concerned with issues of justice and the validity of law (also known as the force of law ). These two problem areas are discussed against the background of the intersection of traditional theories of natural law and legal positivism, mediated by the contribution of the historical school. In addition the influence of the two neo-Kantian schools of thought (Baden and Marburg) required attention, particularly because certain elements in the thought of (...) Derrida, Dooyeweerd and Habermas are (implicitly) influenced by these schools. Derrida positions the problem of justice within the context of distinguishing universality and singularity (what is unique) and he alludes to the difficulty of bridging the gap between the two. It turned out that modern nominalism had an important effect on all three of the mentioned thinkers, in spite of their willingness to recognize “extra-mental” forms of universality. The problem of legal validity (the “force of law”) appears to be an instance of the interconnectedness between different aspects of reality, namely the jural and the physical . In order to account for this coherence Dooyeweerd developed a theory in which both the uniqueness and coherence between different aspects are explained in terms of inter-modal analogies. On this basis the difference between law and justice is specified by distinguishing between constitutive legal principles and the regulatively deepened (disclosed) principles of legal morality (such as f ault, equity, bona fides and so on). It will be shown that the idea of positivization , shared by thinkers coming from different backgrounds, is an important ingredient of an understanding of the nature of legal validity . Explaining it will require a focus on the nature of state law, of the power of the state, and of the legal competence entailed in the office of government. (shrink)

This paper identifies a volitional theory of meaning common to speech act theory and legal positivism, represented by Hart and Kelsen. This model is compared and contrasted with the model of social operations developed by Reid, a Common Sense Enlightenment philosopher. Whereas the former subscribes to the view that meaning is generated by acts of will, the latter finds meaning to consist of the dual elements of sign and 'directedness'.The ability of positivist theories to provide a structural account of (...) the difference between legal rules and other rules is inextricably linked to this commitment to the volitional theory of meaning. The commitment to the volitional view however leads to problems in requiring that some kind of authority be presupposed in for plain rules to attain legal force. Such authority can only be established with recourse to further rules or must be accepted as a matter of faith. Reid's criterion of direction however vitiates the need for an authority, instead accounting for social communication in general, and rules in particular, in terms of sociological factors. Although no comprehensive critique of the volitional theory is proposed, Reid's model is preferable on the grounds of explanatory richness.The core claims of the paper are that: legal positivism necessarily subscribes to the volitional theory of meaning; rejection of the volitional theory necessarily entails rejection of the positivist view that legal and non-legal rules can be differentiated on structural grounds another counter-model exists which avoids some of the pitfalls of the volitional theory; if the volitional theory is rejected then the existence of rules can only be accounted for in a 'strong' sociological sense and legal theory must accordingly accept the dominant role of sociology in conceptualising the nature of rules. (shrink)

In light of new threats in the field of human rights stemming from global geopolitical shifts, criminal law is facing a myriad of new challenges that require adequate responses. Given this context, it is crucial to develop and refine criminal legal measures (CLMs) in order to safeguard societal interests and maintain stability in social relations. This paper undertakes an analysis of contemporary problems in the area of legal regulation and CLMs, as well as assesses the effectiveness of CLMs (...) for individuals engaged in criminal misconduct. The research provides grounds for arguing that the absence of a clear definition of CLMs in Ukrainian legal science renders the term potentially problematic. Moreover, there are currently no taxonomic markers or criteria for classifying CLMs, nor methods for evaluating the effectiveness of specific measures. Within the framework of the announced reforms in Ukraine’s criminal law, it becomes imperative not only to revisit the concept of CLMs but also to develop robust methodologies for assessing their effectiveness. This measure appears necessary both in light of the need to legally formalize CLMs and to systematize them in the future. (shrink)