Accessing Legal Information Across Boundaries: A New Challenge

In: International journal of legal information: IJLI ; the official journal of the International Association of Law Libraries, Band 37, Heft 3, S. 276-305

Abstract

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.