Bilingual Legal Education in Italy: Translating Languages into Teaching Methods

The contribution describes the situation of legal education in Italy from the point of view of the language of teaching. Here the acquisition of the legal terminology expressed in the national language is an essential part of the still mainly theoretical training in law. This is the main reason why in Italy law is still taught in Italian. This is true also for the bilingual or multilingual territories of Italy, where the law is formulated in Italian and in other minority languages (French, German and Ladin). Recently, for reasons that are independent from regional normative bilingualism, the role of foreign languages—namely English—is rapidly increasing and the use of languages other than Italian in legal education is turning into new teaching methodologies