9.1 Veljovic
Luka Veljović. (2021). Legal Linguistics and Ethnological Jurisprudence in Legislative Reforms: Drafting Legislation in Montenegro. International Journal of Law, Language & Discourse 9(1), 41-67.
Abstract: In the context of contemporary legislative reforms, countries that lack a comprehensive and compact corpus of national laws may choose to rely on linguistic methods and techniques inspired by the basic principles of ethnological jurisprudence. The General Property Code for the Principality of Montenegro, written by jurist Valtazar (Baltazar) Bogišić, is one of the rare examples of a legal act drafted primarily on principles that would later become the core of ethnological jurisprudence. The dogmatic teachings of this legal school of thought and its relationship to legal linguistics is summarised, and Bogišić’s ideological and methodological approach to the codification of the General Property Code is reviewed. Special attention is placed on the relevance of Bogišić’s approach to drafting legislation from a contemporary perspective, principally in the countries in which legislative reforms mostly rely on legal transposition: the amelioration and consolidation of national laws through a direct or indirect reliance on foreign legal concepts. The central part of Bogišić’s ideological and methodological approach to legislative reforms is legal linguistics. Therefore, Bogišić’s analysis of Montenegrin legal terminology and his differentiation between the three categories of legal terms appearing in the General Property Code is offered. The study concludes with recommendations for the potential application of Bogišić’s approach to legislative drafting to attain more positive effects from legislative reforms.
Keywords: acquis communautaire, Bogišić, ethnological jurisprudence, General Property Code for the Principality of Montenegro, legal linguistics, legal transposition, legislative reforms
Category: Volume 9
