I’m a bit late in recognizing the new abbreviation of the Court of Justice of the European Union, CJEU, rather than the earlier ECJ.

There’s a useful document in the House of Commons Library – Standard Note SN/IA/3689: The European Union: a guide to terminology, procedures and sources, last updated 16 March 2011.

Here’s the page where you can download it.

EC or EU law? Treaty of Rome or Treaty of Lisbon? First, Second or Third Pillar? Acquis Communautaire? Court of Justice or Court of Human Rights?
This Note aims to clarify some of the terminology used to describe the institutions, laws and procedures of the European Union. It also provides links to useful sources of information on the EU.

It’s 14 pages in length. It contains links for further research and reading.

9 European Courts
There are two main European Courts. Media reports sometimes confuse the two, alleging that the EC/EU has ruled on something when it is in fact the Court of Human Rights that has ruled, and vice versa.
• The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is the EU court which rules on alleged breaches of EC law and the Treaties. CJEU judgments (by convention not spelt with an ‘e’ as in ‘judgements’) can be found on the CURIA website..
•
The European Court of Human Rights is the Council of Europe court which rules on alleged breaches of the European Convention on Human Rights. ECHR judgments can be found on the HUDOC website.

Another point this document mentions is that since the Treaty of Lisbon, all EU legislation can be called EU law. This has been a point of contention in some sections of the ITI, because apparently at a talk they were advised not to use the term ‘EU law’ (although there are books on the subject).

4 EC law or EU law?
Former Article 281 of the Treaty of Rome as amended (and similar articles in the ECSC and Euratom Treaties) gave the EEC ‘legal personality’. That is to say, only the then EEC and its successor, the EC, had rights and obligations under international law allowing it to adopt laws and treaties. Former Article 282 of the EC Treaty conferred upon the EC “the most extensive legal capacity accorded to legal persons” under the national laws of the Member States. The EU did not have this status, and so strictly speaking we should have referred to ‘EC law’ and not to ‘EU law’ in most instances until December 2009.
Until November 1993, when the TEU came into force, the EU’s Official Journal (OJ) references were to ‘EEC’ law. After 1993 the OJ used ‘EC’. The OJ distinguished between EC laws and CFSP or Police/Judicial Cooperation Decisions, which were Second and Third Pillar (EU) instruments. For example, a Council Regulation was written as ‘Council Regulation (EC) 850/2005’ in the Official Journal; a Commission Directive was written as ‘Commission Directive 2005/37/EC’.
All these instruments are now EU instruments. Since the granting of “legal personality” to the EU under the Treaty of Lisbon, it is now technically and legally correct to refer to EU law and EU Treaties.

We still write those Directives and Regulations with ‘(EC)’ etc., but it seems that retrospectively they are all EU documents.

Via Jaanike Erne ideas on europe and Grahnlaw

LATER NOTE (June 2012) – perhaps this is clearer, from the UK parliament site:

9. The CJEU is the collective term for the European Union’s judicial arm,[8] but the single institution consists of three separate courts, each enjoying its own specific jurisdiction. Generally speaking the three courts’ jurisdictions are defined by the types of cases they hear or by the status of the litigant bringing the action and whilst the CJEU does not operate on a formally hierarchical framework like, for example, the UK court structure, it is nevertheless split into three tiers. Forming the upper tier is the Court of Justice (CJ) which was formerly known as the European Court of Justice (ECJ); beneath the CJ is the General Court (GC) which was formerly known as the Court of First Instance (CFI); and the third tier consists of the Civil Service Tribunal (CST), which in the words of the Treaty constitutes the EU’s single “specialised court”.[9] Francis Jacobs, former Advocate General at the Court of Justice and presently Professor of Law at King’s College London, considered this structure a good one.[10]

The term for the court as a whole is CJEU – the term ECJ used to be used both in this collective sense and to refer to the Court of Justice. Now, the collective abbreviation is CJEU and the Court of Justice abbreviation is CJ (sometimes ECJ, I imagine).

This story has been around since well before Christmas and no doubt all readers know about it. The British Ministry of Justice decided to save money on court interpreters and instead of taking interpreters from a national register it transferred all jobs to be dealt with by ALS (Applied Language Solutions), a translation and interpreting agency which offered very low rates. Travel expenses were all radically cut. It was one of those situations where an interpreter would be better off staying at home and working as a cleaner.

Channel 4 News had a summary of it recently: Court translation service in crisis after cost-cutting deal.

Around 1,000 interpreters have not been turning up to court because of the reduced pay and expenses offered by ALS. As a result, court hearings reliant on interpreters have been delayed or postponed, at a high cost to the MoJ and the taxpayer.

One of the most serious cases was at Leeds Crown Court on February 22, which led Judge Robert Bartfield to say: “Apart from the waste of time for the jurors, the distress caused to witnesses and the defendant himself, the cost of this now aborted trial is likely to run into thousands of pounds.” …

At Boston Magistrates court, on February 1, Channel 4 News was told that a Polish interpreter turned up to court wearing a hat and overalls and didn’t understand the solicitor when he said they needed to go down to the cells.

The following day at Basildon Magistrates Court, the interpreter did not know what an oath was. It emerged that this was her first time in court, and she was not familiar with the legal language or protocol.

I must admit that my hopes for sensible attitudes to and pay for court interpreting have always been low. But I did not expect the Ministry of Justice to shoot itself in the foot quite so badly that it looks as if the protesting interpreters may succeed in their wishes.

One could write masses on this, but let me just give a link to a couple of

Questions in parliament. The government seems to take the view that the problems are ‘teething troubles’. Here the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State fails to answer the questions, but he does cite what steps ALS is taking to improve things:

Arranging additional interpreter assessment centres.

Recruitment of additional call handlers, booking administrators and linguist relationship managers.

Introduction of a new administrative team, purely with the function of issuing customer updates.

Secondment of a process management specialist, a management information specialist and an outbound calling team with the brief of further developing the supply of interpreters.

Improvements to the automated booking system.

I love the new job of ‘linguist relationship manager’.

The subject has even hit Mox’s Blog in a cartoon today.

One of the commenters there links to an article about a Czech interpreter who registered her pet rabbit as an interpreter with ALS.

Per Döhler and Thea Döhler have started a joint blog on translation and marketing called Triablog.

It has already built up quite a few articles in secret, but is only now officially launched.

Entries are in German, English or Swedish. There’s also an index, which is a very good idea, in addition to the categories. (I am unhappy with my own system of categories – some of the most useful older posts are unlikely to come to light again, and I have never got round to tagging all the entries imported from my original Movable Type blog). There are tags as well as categories, and there are categories and tags in the various languages, so I will stop thinking about how it all fits together – the main thing is that it’s easy to navigate.

Topics are translation, tax (Per is famous for his disquisition on German VAT), what’s going on in Barendorf and more. Here’s a recent post recommending we use the 24-hour clock in English, at least for European contexts:

In nearly all European countries, while the 12-hour clock may still be used in daily speech, you practically never see it in writing. Where there is an official standard, it calls for the 24-hour time format. But even in Britain (and in Ireland), you can see the 24-hour clock used in timetables, weather reports, in science, and in the military – and of course on the Internet. One may safely assume that there will no serious comprehension problems.

Conversely, changing English texts to reflect the 12-hour clock makes not only for untidy typography but also for potential confusion among all readers, not just those who are not used to seeing things like “12:00 pm” in print. (Incidentally, is that noon or midnight? Even educated native speakers of English are not sure on this issue.) If your schedule says 5:30 pm and the clock on the wall shows 17:20, can you still make it? That is easier to find out if you stay within one system – for the same reason, street names are usually left untranslated.*

The home page has the word Triablog superimposed on images of eight of their ‘summer offices’ abroad. In the ADÜ-Nord Infoblatt 5/2011 (under Publikationen at www.adue-nord.de) there is an article by Per and Thea describing how they combined work and holidays abroad in their summer office by moving everything abroad – to San Francisco, to Sydney, to Oxford, to Stockholm – every year since 1997, and they give suggestions on how to do this.

Happy reading!

Mark Liberman at Language Log has once again, in two posts, discussed the use of corpora in US courts.

I’ve previously mentioned how translators might use a corpus to analyse specialist vocabulary. We do something a bit like that every time we use a search engine to see if an English term is used more in the UK, in US academia or maybe in Germany (could be Denglish). By using special software we can improve the quality of this kind of search.

But that’s not what interests me in the US court examples. What is interesting there is whether a judge can learn to get a better understanding of what words might mean than by just opening a dictionary. Because the understanding of language, particularly by German judges, has sometimes struck me as somewhat retarded. There may be hope in some parts of the USA, though.

The post Corpus linguistics in statutory interpretation (with links) discusses how Judge Posner determined the meaning of the word ‘to harbor’. Among other things, he did a Google search, which indicated that the verb implied sheltering someone, not just living with them.

The post An empirical path to plain legal meaning
links to a PDF file of an article by Stephen Mouritsen, “Hard Cases and Hard Data: Assessing Corpus Linguistics as an Empirical Path to Plain Meaning“:

This Article argues that the plain or ordinary meaning of a given term in a given context is an empirical matter that may be quantified through corpus-based methods. These methods, when applied to questions of legal ambiguity, present significant advantages over existing empirical approaches to plain meaning and over the prevailing intuition-based interpretive approach of many courts. Because large, sophisticated linguistic corpora are widely available and easy to use, and because corpus methods offer a more principled and systematic alternative to the impressionistic interpretation of legal texts, corpus linguistics may one day revolutionize the process of legal interpretation.

There are a number of rules of statutory interpretation in England and in the USA, as there are in Germany – the plain meaning rule is just one of them, and sometimes others override it. But it’s obviously true that ‘plain meaning’ will mean different things to different people.

The Language Log post also has links to a lot of earlier posts on this topic – I’ve linked to them before too. Mark adds an important corrective:

But it’s important to note that corpus-based methods, here as elsewhere, are a source of evidence for linguistic arguments, not a substitute for linguistic arguments. Without an understanding of the categories, structures, and interpretive issues involved in a given question, corpus evidence can lead you as far astray as dictionary quotations can.

It’s a difficult situation. Just as judges have traditionally decided whether someone was insane or had diminished responsibility in a legal sense, rather than in the opinion of psychologists, so I suppose the plain meaning of a statute provision has also traditionally been an amateur’s interpretation. Are these attitudes changing now?

I’ve mentioned sewing of documents before. euobserver.com posts a link to a little video which at least gives a partial impression of sewing the Fiscal Compact Treaty.

I find the RSS feed of euobserver is useful just to briefly scan some of the EU stories that sometimes get overlooked in other news sources.