engleski

The Role of Comparative Legal Analysis in Teaching the Language of the Law

Within the process of globalization and in view of Croatian accession to the European Union the importance of cross-cultural legal communication skills for practicing professionals in Croatia is rapidly growing. Consequently, there is an increasing need of legal practitioners to develop their legal language skills. One of the major issues in teaching the language of law for cross-cultural communication is how to teach divergent culture specific terminology. The problems mostly arise from different legal traditions, and hence the asymmetry of legal systems. The significance of this asymmetry and its consequences for the process of legal language teaching can most clearly be illustrated in the example of teaching legal English in Croatia. The English common law legal system differs considerably from the Croatian civil law legal system. Therefore, where the participants of legal English courses expect to be taught matching equivalents, which would enable them to communicate more efficiently in their international contacts, they are confronted with only a partial overlap of legal systems and the relativity of concepts. This requires a teaching approach in which the teaching of language cannot be separated from the teaching of content. In this respect comparative legal analysis is a very useful and efficient method, which helps us clarify the content and serves as a basis for a discussion about the appropriateness of usage of certain legal terms as near or approximate equivalents. This paper aims to demonstrate the use of comparative studies as a useful and sometimes necessary tool for teaching legal language. Several illustrative examples from the field of company law as an area of frequent terminological confusion and misinterpretation will be analyzed to illustrate it. The analysis will be based on the comparative study of the UK Companies Act 2006 and the Croatian Companies Act in the above-mentioned areas.

legal language teaching, legal terminology, comparative legal analysis

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