Overview

International law is usually communicated in more than one language and reflects common norms that lawyers and adjudicators across national legal cultures agree on and develop together. As a result, the negotiation of the wording and meaning of international legislative texts is an integral part of legal interpretation in international law. This book sheds light on that essential interpretation process. Language and Legal Interpretation in International Law treats the subject from the perspective of recent legal and linguistic theories of meaning. Anne Lise Kjær and Joanna Lam bring together internationally renowned experts to provide strong theoretical and practical foundations for the study of legal interpretation in such fields as human rights law, international trade, investment and commercial law, EU law, and international criminal law. The volume explains how the positivist tradition--in which interpretation is understood as an automatic process by which judges simply apply the text of legislative instruments to specific fact situations--cannot be upheld in an era of pragmatic and cognitive meaning theories. Those theories instead focus on the context of interpretation and on the interpreter as a co-producer of meaning. Through a collection of thoroughly researched and timely essays, this book explores the linguistically and culturally diversified world of meaning-making in international law.

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9780190855208

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Anne Lise Kjær is an Associate Professor of Legal Linguistics (tenured) at the Centre of Excellence for International Courts (iCourts) at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen. Her present research focuses on the role that language plays in the development and interpretation of international law. She has investigated the European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She has also analyzed Scandinavian Supreme Courts with a view to identifying how they translate and transplant European Human Rights concepts into the languages and reasoning of their case law. She applies a combination of research methods, including, but not limited to, discourse analysis, translation studies, and corpus linguistics. She is on the steering committee of the International Language and Law Association (ILLA) and Director of the Scandinavian based international research network of Legal Linguistics, RELINE. Joanna Lam is Professor of International Economic Law and Director of Study Hub for International Economic Law and Development (SHIELD) at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen. She is also affiliated with the Centre of Excellence for International Courts (iCourts) and with Kozminski University, and serves as the Chair of the Nordic-Asian Forum for International Economic Law. Lam graduated from Harvard Law School and University of Warsaw (summa cum laude) and holds doctoral and habilitation degrees in legal studies. A former Fulbright Fellow, she completed visiting appointments at, inter alia, Harvard Law School; University of California, Berkeley; Renmin University; and UNIDROIT. Her recent research focuses on legal interpretation in international arbitration; on transformations of investor-state dispute resolution; and on the role of international economic law in the green transition.

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