Legal Taxonomy Syllabus
A Dictionary and Repository on European Consumer Law
The Project
The Legal Taxonomy Syllabus was developed during the TMR research programme "Uniform Terminology for European Private Law" (2002-2006).The network has combined the activities of seven universities: University of Turin (Italy), University of Barcelona (Spain), University of Lyon 3 (France), University of Münster (Germany), University of Nijmegen (The Netherlands), University of Oxford (United Kingdom), University of Warsaw (Poland).Aim and Scope
The legal orders of the EC Member States are currently on the verge of further convergence of their respective private law - a process which is strongly influenced and directed by European primary and secondary legislation. One tool which might help to increase consistency during this process through the means of highlighting European and national legal terms and concepts is the Legal Taxonomy Syllabus (Consumer Law). Indeed, the legal language of the Community encompasses various inconsistencies due to the lack of coherence among different sectoral legislative interventions.The Syllabus can serve as an instrument to describe the content and relevance of consumer law rules both at European and domestic level, taking into account horizontal divergences (i.e. between various legal instruments at European level or between various national legal orders), but also vertical divergences (i.e. differing legal concepts between the European and domestic level). With regard to the European or national legislator, the Syllabus can enhance coherency already at the drafting stage by providing for an insight into the existing consumer law terms and concepts and a better understanding of the impact of any further legislative act within the Member States. With regard to translators, the Syllabus could serve as a specific tool to enhance uniformity of legal language without losing national traditions transposed in different expressions and to select legal terms more consistent with the pre-existent choices of the European legislator.
What is the LTS
During the last few years, two approaches have emerged, which may be faced in a synergic way. The first of them concerns the legal domain, and refers to the need to define in a precise way the relationship between different legal systems which is of paramount importance in a European perspective. In light of this problem, the approach taken by EC Institutions has been characterised by the creation and expansion of wide terminology databases and by the development of a body of linguistic translators.But some of the issues related to this matter are not, properly speaking, linguistic. Indeed, the difficulties we experience in translating certain key concepts of law are in function of their location in an established system of legal concepts. In fact, the problem involves some aspects of the relationship among different legal concepts used within European private law, in other words the "taxonomy" of legal language.
Now it is crucial in European law to identify the main issues concerning the homologation of concepts. Homologation means that legal categories of a certain legal system have to be traced back to the categories of another system.
The homologation of legal concepts assumes that the terms carrying concepts are properly identified at the Community level and at each State Member level.
The second approach concerns computer science, and refers to the availability of computational tools enabling different computer systems to exchange and share data and knowledge. This second approach is strictly connected with the development of Internet, and in particular with the recent proposals to enable the users not only to "data", but also "semantic contents".
The task of producing formal descriptions of knowledge is currently faced from two different points of view. The first of them is exemplified by the activities aiming at the development of "structured dictionaries" (the classical example is WordNet); the second point of view is embodied in the current research efforts on formal ontologies. Structured dictionaries are databases of terms (both general and domain-dependent) organized as taxonomies on the basis of synonymy and hyponymy relations. Various versions of WordNet are currently available. The largest describes the English vocabulary and currently includes more than 100.000 terms, while smaller versions exist for Italian (around 60.000 terms) and for other languages. WordNet can be used as a support for linguistic analysis, in particular for term disambiguation (ambiguous words) and for the semantic analysis of texts.
With respect to ontological knowledge, it is commonly assumed that, differently from what happens for the lexical knowledge, it is largely independent of the language. Of course, this is not intended to mean that that the "concepts" present in the ontology are independent of the knowledge that must be represented (knowledge which depends on the local context), but only that the contents of the ontology is related only partially to the linguistic expressions. For instance, consider the legal term "frutti civili" (Art. 820 Italian Civil Code), which lacks a direct translation in some legal systems, but for which a conceptual correspondence clearly does exist.
The Syllabus combines these two approaches in presenting a wide-access database on European consumer law with knowledge representational tools. The database covers EU terminology drawn out from the main EC provisions on consumer protection together with the transposition law within several jurisdictions (England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy).
By providing a minimum of background information through short commentary notes by national legal scholars, it is furthermore possible to mirror the architecture of existing legal terms and concepts for every Member State considered, thus helping legal practitioners by providing an interpretative guide into European legal terms.