But it won’t be flowering at this time of year.

A non-profit site for texts and links on German law in English has been set up with the help of the German Foreign Office:

Centre for German Legal Information

I completely missed this until alerted by a comment, but it has been widely announced on German embassies from the beginning of September onwards.

The site offers legislation, decisions and other materials, such as articles, with links to German law resources in English online.

It is possible to search for German or English titles (the German Law Archive only uses the English titles).

LATER NOTE: German statutes, for example, are translated into English by many different authorities, including international ones, and provided free of charge online. Not all the translations are good, of course, but legal translators need to be able to discriminate. One problem in finding statute translations is that the URL may change. You may often find a translation via Google if it isn’t where you expected.

This site should be a resource to find those translations. Thus, for example, if you have to translate a new statute including alterations to an old one, you may want to see what previous translators have done.

Having said that: the site does give a full text search, which I haven’t tried. It also has an FAQ and users’ guide. But I would hesitate to use a translated statute as a terminology resource.

The BBC reports that a sign saying ‘No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only’ reads in Welsh ‘I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated’.

(Thanks to u-forum – must have slipped past AvO)

The Illicit Cultural Property Blog reported recently that pre-Columbian objects of Costa Rica’s national heritage valued at more than 100 million dollars are not being retrieved for lack of funds for a Spanish-German translation.

(Spotted by Trevor)

Introduction to English law for translators and/or non-lawyers

Following the list of geographical and political terms around the islands, I now turn to the legal systems in the United Kingdom.

The first point is that there are three legal systems in the UK: in England and Wales; in Scotland; and in Northern Ireland.

We don’t usually talk about UK law or British law.

To compare:

Germany is a unitary state with federal law. There is some law that varies from Land to Land, but most law is federal. It’s German law.

The USA has fifty states and a federal district – these are separate jurisdictions. Thus you get the law of New York, the law of California, the law of Texas and so on. It also has federal law, not a huge amount but some: U.S. law.

But the UK has no federal law, although it has a central parliament in Westminster, and a central government and monarch (there has been some devolution in recent years to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, and Northern Ireland has an Assembly too and has intermittently had some self-government since it came into existence).

This is put succinctly by the New Oxford Companion to Law:

The United Kingdom is an unusual state in that it is comprised of three separate legal systems … This reflects the history of relationships amongst these entities. When the United Kingdom came into being in 1801, it was not a traditional unitary state. While a head of state, government, and Parliament were all shared, when the new United Kingdom Parliament legislated for this new state it was not making United Kingdom or British law, but rather making common provisions which would apply in all of the three legal systems. This continues under the devolution arrangements which have been in place since 1999. There is no separate system of federal law in respect of those powers which have not been devolved from the Westminster Parliament to the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, and the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Terms: Jurisdiction: One could say: there are three legal systems, or three jurisdictions. One meaning of jurisdiction is an area with its own legal system. Thus the term ‘English law’ is short for ‘English and Welsh law’ and refers to the legal system in the jurisdiction of England and Wales. This term has no simple equivalent in German. Jurisdiction can also mean the area of a court’s jurisdiction (Gerichtsbezirk, Zuständigkeit).

The best translation into German of ‘in various/several/other jurisdictions’ is often ‘in … Ländern’.

One sometimes encounters the German term Jurisdiktion translated as Rechtsprechung or die rechtsprechende Gewalt. Here we are getting into deeper waters. Problems my students had here may have resulted from the fact that they weren’t really familiar with the terms in German, so the English equivalent didn’t register either. Die rechtsprechende Gewalt, one of the three branches of power, is the judiciary (Richterschaft).

The three branches of power: the executive, the legislature, the judiciary (Exekutive, Legislative, Judikative).

But Rechtsprechung is more commonly used to mean case law.

Of course, the literal translation from the Latin of Jurisdiktion is Rechtsprechung, but that doesn’t help.

English law: (now) the law of England and Wales

There are separate legal systems in the Isle of Man and the Channel Isles, but these are not part of the UK.

English law today means the legal system of England and Wales, with its system of courts and lawyers. Historically, England was the country where the common law first developed. It spread from England to Wales and to the whole of the island of Ireland, but it did not spread to Scotland. Scots law is a hybrid system, a mixture of civil law (kontinentaleuropäisch) and common law. Thus the legal system in the independent country Ireland is closer to that of England than the legal system in Scotland, a part of the UK.

beck-blog reports that the document of which JUVE apparently had a sneak preview has now appeared (see earlier entry).

Bündnis für das deutsche Recht PDF file
Bundesjustizministerium press release

beck-blog points out some of the reasons why German law is not always popular abroad.

Auf glattes Unverständnis trifft insbesondere das AGB-Recht, denn hier können die meisten nicht nachvollziehen, warum Grundsätze, die aus dem Verbraucherschutz kommen, auch zwischen Unternehmen gelten sollen. Zum ”schlechten Image” des deutschen Rechts trägt maßgeblich auch das deutsche Arbeitsrecht bei, das von vielen ausländischen Unternehmen als zu einseitig arbeitnehmerschützend wahrgenommen wird.

In Germany one gets married at a register office, and a church wedding is an extra.
In the UK, one gets married at a register office, or in a church, or in various other places – the paperwork can be done at any.

But the law varies between the three jurisdictions: England and Wales; Scotland; Northern Ireland. Scotland has traditionally offered a wide range. I did not realize that it is the only UK jurisdiction, and one of only six in the world, where a humanist wedding is legal.

Thus reports Fiona at Divorce Survivor.

See also Your big Day! – tips for planning your humanist wedding in Scotland.

I don’t believe the kilt is obligatory.