MULTILINGUALISM AT THE COURT OF JUSTICE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ASPECTS

The paper analyses and evaluates the linguistic policy of the Court of Justice of the European Union against the background of other multilingual courts and in the light of theories of legal interpretation. Multilingualism has a direct impact upon legal interpretation at the Court, displacing traditional approaches (intentionalism, textualism) with a hermeneutic paradigm. It also creates challenges to the acceptance of the Court’s case-law in the Member States, which seem to have been adequately tackled by the Court’s idiosyncratic translation policy.