EU Law Concepts as Legal Transplants: Linguistic Difficulties of Transferring EU Consumer Law Concepts into Ukrainian Legal System

Abstract

This article’s purpose is to review certain EU legal concepts from a comparative law and linguistics perspective and to create guidelines for adapting these EU law concepts to the conceptual system of the member states. This article draws on comparative law studies for the theory of legal transplants and on linguistics for the methodology of terminology. After analyzing the EU legal concepts as a specific type of transplants, the article focuses on specific examples of legal transplantation from EU consumer protection law. In this process, the EU law is the source system and the Ukrainian law is the recipient. Based on the consumer protection law examples, this article identifies and explains the most common linguistic reasons for transplant failures, describes the possible legal outcome for the recipient legal system and proposes a possible solution using linguistic methods.

Keywords

• eu law
• legal harmonization
• consumer law
• legal concepts
• legal transplantation