The rocky road to legal discourse
Legal discourse is an important ingredient in elaborating and standardising EU laws, but fragmentation, linguistic challenges and even philosophical issues have left this field incomplete. The EU-funded project 'Discursivity. A philosophical inquiry into legal history' (LEGAL Discursivity) elaborated a clearer definition of legal discursivity, giving way to more precise normative theory and practical rationality. The project investigated if legal semantics were not understood due to flawed underlying philosophy of language. It looked at how experts attempted to link justice beyond language to nature, life, justification and other concepts. LEGAL Discursivity questioned existing literature on the subject, mostly presented in a rhetorical, communicational, formal and rather piecemeal approach. Project members espoused a more modern conception of the subject and focused on the very nature of practical reason. In addition, the team used more interdisciplinary methodology involving an in-depth analysis of the specificity of natural logic, i.e. language, as opposed to formal logic. The approach also considered existing literature in legal theory on discursivity and a comparison of Ricoeur and Habermas’ philosophies of law. It revealed how legal theory literature on discursivity misunderstood the importance of the interpretive, that is, hermeneutic, dimension of legal language. After analysing all the different angles and issues, LEGAL Discursivity successfully concluded that language lies at the centre of practical reason. It achieved this by emphasising the role of translation as the core of a discursive conception of justice. in other words, by studying formal logic, natural language and discursive semantics the project showed why justification could never be fully formalised or reduced to argumentation. It disclosed how attempts to radicalise the philosophy of justice beyond language, through the notion of recognition of 'life', could not yield a more comprehensive understanding of the issue. Lastly, LEGAL Discursivity called for a philosophy of translation to elaborate a contemporary theory of justice (practical reason), promoting flexible intercultural dialogue on the subject. This has been seen as particularly useful in the digital age: it opens the door for exchanges on legal discourse and takes civilisation a step closer to understanding its true nature and definition.