The Languages of Valuation Law

Abstract

A survey of valuation law conducted across jurisdictions whose law is written in thirty-six source languages (each jurisdiction counted once, under the language its law is written in) in a journal that itself publishes in twelve, produced a result its author did not expect: the jurisdictions surveyed cluster by legal-linguistic lineage rather than by geography, and at least one agreement the department had attributed to common ancestry turns out on inspection to be independent convergence. This article sets out what the multilingual method revealed, distinguishes four ways in which a language carries law across borders, and corrects one point in the department's draft comparative synthesis.