Harmonisation of European contract law and legal translation: a role for comparative lawyers

The problem of harmonising the contract in Europe has caught the interest of law professors, researchers and the European institutions. After years of debates, the European Union is aware that a lack of uniform legal terminology prevents any kind of unification and harmonisation of European Contract law. The need for a uniform legal terminology clashes with the multilingual legal terminology of European law. In Europe there is not just one, but many legislative and administrative languages, and each of them is an official language of the European institutions. In accordance with the principle of linguistic equality, the European Community (EC) recognises that all legal instruments have to be drawn up and published in all the official languages of the Member States. But every linguistic version of the same European legal instrument has not a functional and teleological equivalence of meaning, since every language reflects the legal culture of a specific legal system. Instead of suggesting a solution to the conflict between linguistic equality and the need for uniform legal terminology, the article focuses on the dangers of legal translation and claims a role for the comparative lawyer in the process of harmonisation of European Contract law

The Exportability of the Principles of Software: Lost in Translation

The American Law Institute approval of The Principles of Software Contracts is a significant milestone in the history of software law. The project began in 2004 because of the flaws of the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act concerning this issue, problems strengthened by the widely held perception that the law at the time was undeveloped, confused, and conflicting. Software licensing is presently America\u27s third largest industry and has suffered from the mechanical extension of the law of sales to software over the last forty years, much like courts imported horse and buggy law to resolve problems posed by the automobile. Thankfully, the Principles achieve the objective of bringing common sense to the common law of software contracts. However, the project is heavily centered on the United States with limited exportability to the European Union in its current form. This piece looks at the path of software contracting law over the past twenty years, the Principles of Software Contracts itself, and its exportability to the rest of the world, particularly the European Union