Chairs
• Roberto Scarciglia rscarcigliaunits@gmail.com
• Giovanna Tieghi giovanna.tieghi@unipd.it
• Ino Augsberg augsberg@law.uni-kiel.de
• Juan Ignacio Chia jchia@law.uni-kiel.de
• Erika Arban arban.erika@gmail.com

SPEAKERS

Luis Abel	Zarate-meriles
Rosa	Mayrhofer
Aldo Alesandro	Santome Sánchez
Alfonso Renato	Vargas Murillo
Andrés Felipe	Delgado Correal
Bryan Steven	Silva Guamushig
Diego	López-Medina
Jose Miguel	Camacho Castro
Lucrezia	Cadamuro
Mingtao	Huang
Natalia	Rueda

Legal education and research in constitutional law are increasingly confronted with linguistic and methodological challenges, as the comprehension of intricate legal phenomena requires not only conceptual clarity but also linguistic and cultural awareness and sensitivity. Although legal scholarship is one of the oldest academic disciplines, the debate on legal language and method remains to this day sparse and sporadic, even if some studies have been dedicated to methodology and language and their interconnection, thus opening new avenues of enquiry. This often leaves legal scholars unaware of the need for a proper (legal) methodological approach to describe the complexity of comparison in an era of globalisation, characterised as it is by a continuous flow of ideas, traditions, and terminology across jurisdictions. This situation has thus elicited demands for a decolonisation of the discipline and a re-evaluation of the methodological foundations upon which constitutional law scholarship is conducted.

At the same time, concerns about language from a constitutional outlook are upgrading the level of investigation in the field of law and linguistics. This is increasingly having an impact on the training of new generations of legal scholars.

Simultaneously, the very concept of the Constitution has evolved beyond the Nation-State, being transferred to supranational and even international contexts, where law circulates through processes of translation—both linguistic and conceptual. The translation of constitutional law thus poses not only a question of legal theory regarding the notion of the norm, which is sometimes understood as an unalterable substrate that can be expressed in different ways. Translation processes also pose a practical problem: if norms are inseparable from the language in which they are expressed, then each act of translation necessarily transforms the law itself. The experience of multilingual constitutional and international courts underscores this tension: Does the form of presentation really not affect the essential content? Or is the content necessarily influenced by the way it is presented to listeners or readers?

A more thorough discussion on appropriate research methodologies and languages in the field has thus become a pressing concern, as a new toolbox and new ideas are needed. Accordingly, the purpose of this workshop is to gather a group of constitutional law scholars to sharpen focus on linguistic and methodological aspects in (comparative) constitutional law—including the impact of teaching-learning methodologies—to develop a sustainable theory and practice of constitutional law.

Questions to be discussed may include (but are not limited to) the following themes:

Importance of national languages in discussions at domestic and international levels, considering the role of English as a lingua franca.

Ways in which methods and languages can cope with the impact of globalisation on legal traditions, and how they can develop a global heritage.

Legal pluralism, cultural traditions, and critical comparison.

Ways to reply to negative constitutional law.

Translation situations in individual national constitutional courts and international courts, potential problems arising from multilingual jurisprudence, and the most suitable methodological approaches for situating the work of constitutional courts in comparative debate.

Constitutionalisation processes as translation processes.

The constitutional basis for linguistic human rights, such as the right to use one’s own language when communicating with public officials and during court proceedings, and the practical problems of implementing these rights.

Transfer of non-legal expertise and its processing in constitutional court decisions, and ways of carrying out interdisciplinary research.

The role of Global English for legal studies within a sustainable constitutional framework.