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AbstractIn 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.

Accessing legal information is a primary requirement for a variety of communities: ordinary citizens, scholars, and professionals. The dissemination of legal information contributes to the rule of law and to the overall ideals of democracy in a number of ways. Many are the benefits of accessing legal information, such as the awareness of the applicable rule of law, the creation of conditions necessary to the equality and fairness of a legal system, while improving the functioning of democratic institutions, the development and improvement of social and economic conditions.

Effective and clear communication on legal issues and related implications in EU-funded research and innovation projects is a fundamental requirement which allows partners to achieve project outcomes according to the EU legislation. As a matter of fact, law permeates every aspect of society and it has an undeniable impact in every daily activity under European projects tasks. Partners without legal background and expertise should be considered as "non-experts" when facing with legal information. In particular, the use of a specialized terminology, as it is language of the law, accentuates communication difficulties and prevents to this target group to understand and be understood.

The functionality of the Portal to legal literature, which is under development at ITTIG, is described, focusing on a linking mechanism created to allow navigation between statutory rules, judicial cases and legal literature pieces of work. Reference is made to previous works carried out by Italian institutions for the identification of legislation and case law resources through URN identifiers. The design of a URN for legal literature material is planned to ensure cross-access to legal sources on the basis of user surveys carried out for the purpose of better customize the Portal's services. The main features of the proposed URN for legal literature material are described as well as tools developed for the Portal based on an OpenURL resolver mechanism in order for users to start from the examination of a law (legislation) to its interpretation (legal literature) and further to analyse the enforcement of that law in judicial cases (case law).