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Accessing Legal Information Across Boundaries: A New Challenge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2019

Ginevra Peruginelli
Ginevra Peruginelli*
Affiliation:
Institute of Theory and Techniques of Legal Information, National Research Council, Florence (Italy)
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Abstract

In the actual multilingual and multicultural environment there is a significant need, in the academic world, in the legal profession, in business settings as well as in the context of public administration services to citizens, of common understanding and exchange of legal concepts of the various legal systems. At the same time, there is a strong pressure for the preservation of their basic sense and value. Both requirements are quite difficult to meet, and they are complicated by the complexity of legal language and by the variety of modalities used to express law within the various legal systems. Unlike a number of technical and scientific disciplines where a fair correspondence exists between concepts across languages, serious difficulties arise in interpreting law across countries and languages. This is largely due to the system-bound nature of legal terminology. This paper focuses on cross-language retrieval systems’ ability to facilitate access to legal information across different languages and legal orders. As such, issues are addressed relating to linguistics and translation theory, comparative law, theory of law, as well as natural language processing techniques, while some recommendations are provided with the aim to contribute to cross-language retrieval of law.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Legal Information , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , Winter 2009 , pp. 276 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by the International Association of Law Libraries. 

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