YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...

WORKSHOP
nym for legal categories, and at other times it is used simply as a synonym for
‘words’.
terminology is actually about something else. It is work on groups of legal
terms put into context. thus, the reason why we called our tool the ‘Legal
taxonomy syllabus’, with an emphasis on terminology, is that we wanted to
place the deinitions of the terms into context — context being the normative
background.
from this very moment, the perspective clearly appears — ending up with
a semantic tool, a research tool which enables the user to get the meaning and,
eventually, the translation of different related words, linked together. this is in
fact the same way Google works today.
we have decided to limit our research to consumer law for two simple
reasons. One is that there is a bulk of easily identiiable sets of rules: the directives
on consumer law as quoted in the Green Paper on European Union Consumer
Protection (COm(2001) 531 inal), together with a couple of important
directives which were added in 2003 and 2005. this made up a distinctive
corpus which was narrow enough to permit this exercise, but also general
enough to give sense to it, taking into account that consumer law today is still
the core of contract law within the European Union. the corpus is therefore
composed of the directives identiied in the 2001 Green Paper plus the 2005
directive on distance marketing of consumer inancial services ( 3 ).
we tried — and this is a very ambitious statement — to make this tool useful
for several groups of users, and I would say mainly to all those having an
interest in getting access to the meaning of consumer law in different languages:
lawyers, translators, legislators and scholars. when we mention legislators, we
refer particularly to the common framework of reference which was set by the
Commission in 2003. the idea is that the common framework of reference
should lead the European legislator to a coherent, restated set of regulations
from the acquis, which should enable better law-making and better regulation.
Entering now the structure of the Syllabus as such, the irst thing to say is
that it comprises 90 terms identiied within consumer law directives. these
terms are explored following a two-step approach. Step 1 gives the horizontal
perspective: it maps the occurrence of the selected terms in EU law and identi-
( 3 ) Directive 2002/65/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 September
2002 concerning the distance marketing of consumer inancial services and amending
Council Directive 90/619/EEC and Directives 97/7/EC and 98/27/EC, OJ L 271,
9.10.2002, pp. 16–24.
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