Considerations on global access to rights: anlysis of multilingual search tools

Abstract

In the contemporary society there is the need of a common understanding of the legal issues of the different court systems, in the academy as well as in the legal profession, in the business world, and in the public administration services. At the same time there is a strong pressure in order to preserve their sense and value, but it is very difficult to satisfy both the needs due to the complexity of the legal language and of the ways to express law in the different systems. Unlike other disciplines where a correspondence of ideas and concepts in different languages exists, there are some difficulties in rights due to the nature of the legal language and its correlation to the native legal system. The article offers some ideas on the requirements of multilingual systems for legal information research through the exam of conceptual and linguistic aspects to be taken into account in order to develop those systems underlining the problems related to legal translation, comparative law, and techniques to elaborate natural language to access and retrieve information in a distribute context. Recommendations deal on a side with methods to define equivalences between legal concepts, on the other with forms of collaboration among institutions (responsible for indexing and distribution of legal information), to guarantee the access to information to each citizen in the preferred language