Legal vs. linguistical puralism : a misunderstood duality?

We live in a world with many legal systems and languages that interact continuously,  either in space or time.
Regarding the latter, many chronological interactions can be described as ‘legal transplant’ in between national laws. 
In this way, sometimes, entire legal structures are borrowed from a foreign country. 

That was the case for the Swiss Code of Obligations, which Turkey has adopted in the 30s. In the beginning, at least, the Turkish judges may have interpreted a concept by examining its meaning in Swiss law, which implied the use of comparison between Turkish and Swiss legal systems.

Another interesting case, this time of ‘synthetic’ transplant relates to the Civil Code of Ethiopia, which has been designed by great comparative scholar, René David,  who took into account rules or institutions from France, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, Israel, etc. The Ethiopian judge, willing to clarify, an obscure term in the new code may have used multiple comparison between his own system and the origin of each specific disposition.

But such ‘legal transplant’ may also occur between legal systems of a different kind. 
For example International Law may borrow concepts and rules from national law. 
The international legal scholars have played a role in this transposition since they were fed of their national legal culture. 

More recently, in many disputes of highly technical issues, the International Courts or the Arbitrators have resorted to long-established institutions from private national laws.

In the case of conventional International Law it was the language of treaties which seemed to provide the solution. Given the absence of a specific language of International Law, different from States' languages, the international rules were necessarily written ​​in one national language. Through these vehicular languages, the legal concepts and institutions of national laws passed to International Law.

In the last 70 years, the emergence of multilingual treaties has added complexity to the whole process. 

If only one language version of the Treaty's text is authentic (the other versions being just its official translations), the interpreter may use only that official version. Therefore the interpretation of multilingual legal texts was similar to the interpretation of a monolingual text.

More interesting was the second case, where all linguistic versions of a Treaty was equally authentic. In this case, the interpreter might have to use the multilingual systems of interpretation codified in article 33 of The 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

The European Union had both situations.

If this brief presentation catches the attention of the reader, he may find a still evolving draft of Multijuralism and interpretative comparison by Judge of International Organizations: European Union case at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2342090.