Welcome to ZERL

The Zeitschrift für Europäische Rechtslinguistik (ZERL) was founded by the European Legal Linguistics section of the University of Cologne. Background and history of European Legal Linguistic Studies are sketched in the Editorial. They focus on European politics, multilingualism and law, and so does our Journal ZERL.

ZERL is an up-to-date platform oriented at multilingual, transdisciplinary, comparative and implementational research at the crossroads of law and linguistics, bringing together researchers, lecturers, trainers and professionals of lawmaking and interpretation and application of law for a fruitful exchange of theory and practice. Particular attention is paid to multilingual European law.

Contributions are published in the sections Research, Reviews, Lectures, the Special Issue 2010 with the proceedings of a European Legal Linguistics symposium celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, and the Special Issue 2021 with the proceedings of the 5th Symposium on the Comprehensibility of Legal Provisions hosted by the Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz of the Federal Republik of Germany, as well as Sketches on current work and Interdisciplinary contributions.

They must be original work which has not been submitted or published elsewhere, and will be peer-reviewed. PDFs and HTML versions are published under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Licence and can be accessed free of charge at any time, according to open access policy.