Ask a seemingly simple question: how do you say “law” in Europe?
The answer quickly becomes more interesting than a mere list of translations and reveals two main recurring ideas.
Across several linguistic families, words connect law either with what is right/just or something that has been laid down, set or established.
Arguably, one should not read too much in etymology. The origins of a word do not necessarily determine how a modern legal system understands law. Yet, words do preserve traces of how concepts have travelled through European history. And in a European Union whose law exists simultaneously in 24 official languages, those traces are more than a linguistic curiosity. In point of fact, they reveal a remarkable shared legal heritage and philosophy.
Law as what is “right”
Take the Romance languages.
French droit, Italian diritto, Spanish derecho, Portuguese direito and Catalan dret belong to the same broad family. Behind them lies the idea of something direct or straight (derectus, a variant of the Classical Latin directus). The movement from “straight” to “right” and eventually to “law” is remarkably suggestive.
Something similar appears in the Germanic languages. German Recht and Dutch recht are immediately recognisable to an English speaker through the word right. The vocabulary moves easily between the spatial, moral and legal worlds: the right direction, doing the right thing, a legal right and the law itself.
A comparable association can be found across much of the Slavic linguistic world. Polish prawo, Czech and Slovak právo, and related forms similarly originate from what is right or correct.
Regardless of linguistic families, across large parts of continental Europe, therefore, we encounter a recurring conceptual metaphor: law is linguistically associated with rightness.
For lawyers, the metaphor feels almost natural. We distinguish right from wrong. We speak of rectifying an injustice. Law, in this linguistic tradition, appears to point towards a normative standard: not merely what has been commanded, but what is in some sense right.
Law as something “laid down”
And then there is English.
Simplifying things somewhat, the word law came into English through Scandinavian influence, from the Old Norse linguistic family represented today by Swedish lag. Its underlying image is something fixed or laid down.
One can think here of the Danelaw, the name traditionally given to parts of northern and eastern England in which Scandinavian settlement and legal customs had a particularly strong influence. Historians rightly caution against imagining the Danelaw too simply as one neatly bounded territory governed by a single separate legal code. But the linguistic connection remains wonderfully visible: the Old English expression Dena lagu referred to the “law of the Danes”.
Law here evokes a different image. It is not primarily something right. It is something set down by and for a given community.
The same metaphor appears elsewhere. Latvian likums conveys the same idea, something put or placed. German Gesetz, although not the general word Recht, similarly contains the idea of something gesetzt: set or established.
The contrast should not be pushed too far. English obviously possesses the vocabulary of rights, justice and equity, while continental legal systems are hardly unfamiliar with positive and enacted law. Etymology cannot make a legal culture positivist or natural-law oriented.
Still, the contrast is irresistible: law as what is right, and law as what has been laid down.
Sometimes a language has both
The story becomes more interesting still because many European languages contain both ideas.
French distinguishes droit from loi. German distinguishes Recht from Gesetz. Dutch has recht and wet; Italian diritto and legge; Spanish derecho and ley.
The first term may denote law in the abstract, the legal system, a field of law or—importantly—an individual right. The second more naturally denotes an enacted law or legislative rule.
And this pattern reaches well beyond the major continental languages.
Welsh distinguishes cyfraith, law in the sense of a legal order or body of law, from deddf, which can designate an Act or enacted law.
Lithuanian provides an especially striking example. Teisė can mean both law and a legal right, while įstatymas denotes an enacted law.
These languages therefore contain, within their own vocabulary, something close to our two competing images: law as right, and law as that which is enacted or laid down.
And Greek gives us another image
Modern Greek νόμος (nomos), “law”, continues Ancient Greek nomos, traditionally associated with nemein: to distribute, allot or apportion.
Here the underlying image is neither simply straightness nor legislation. It is one of ordering and distribution: giving things their proper place.
That should not be turned into an elaborate theory of Greek legal thought. But it reminds us that even our predominant and neat contrast between what is “right” and what is “laid down” does not exhaust the ways European languages have imagined law.
Law, or right?
There is also a deeper translation problem.
Gregor Albers has explored it beautifully in his essay Pluralism of what? On Laws, and on Rights – in Translation.i His starting point is that terms such as Latin ius, French droit, Italian diritto and German Recht do not correspond to one English word. Depending on context, they may mean law or a right.
Accordingly, when an English lawyer distinguishes “law” from “rights”, the distinction appears linguistically obvious. In other European languages, the relationship may be encoded differently. Le droit can give you un droit. Das Recht can give you ein Recht.
Languages do not merely attach different labels to identical conceptual boxes. Sometimes they conceive the boxes differently.
So even the elementary instruction “translate the word law” may be impossible without first asking: in which sense?
The European Union: law without a single language
For EU lawyers, this is not an academic curiosity.
The European Union has created a common legal order without creating a common legal language. English has become an important drafting and working language, but EU legislation ultimately exists in 24 official languages, and the language versions in which EU acts are adopted are equally authentic. The Court of Justice has repeatedly emphasised that interpretation of EU law may therefore require comparison between language versions rather than treating one as the original and the others as mere translations.
Data protection offers obvious examples. Lawyers across Europe work every day with notions such as consent, controller, processing, legitimate interests, lawfulness and rights. The English terminology may appear transparent, but the same concepts operate simultaneously in languages that organise the semantic territory of “law” and “right” rather differently.
Multilingualism can therefore reveal distinctions that one language conceals. Conversely, a distinction that feels self-evident in French, German or Lithuanian may become less visible when everything is rendered in English.
So how does Europe say “law”?
It says droit, diritto, derecho, Recht, recht, prawo, právo, cyfraith, teisė, nomos, lag, law—and much else besides.
Behind those words we glimpse law as something right, something laid down, and sometimes something that orders and apportions.
Yet all of them must ultimately be capable of expressing a common European legal order.
Perhaps that is one of the quiet achievements—and permanent challenges—of European integration: Europe has created a common legal order without creating a common legal language.
And beneath its vocabulary remains a question as old as jurisprudence itself:
Is law what is right, or is law simply what has been laid down?
Perhaps the pragmatic answer is contained in the old maxim: dura lex, sed lex.
It need not be right to be law.
i Albers, Gregor, “Pluralism of what? On Laws, and on Rights – in Translation”, EViR Blog, 09.10.2023.
Stefaan van der Jeught is a Professor of EU Constitutional Law at the Brussels School of Governance (Institute for European Studies) and the Faculty of Law and Criminology (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, VUB). He is also a press officer at the Court of Justice of the EU.