In the context of growing anxieties regarding the place and role of law in the future of the Europe Union (EU), this article reflects upon the extent to which Paul Kahn’s cultural study of law’s rule could be relevant for the place and role of EU law in these respects. Drawing upon Kahn’s monograph Making the Case: The Art of the Judicial Opinion, this article analyses the Laval judgment for these purposes, as one of the most controversial cases ever decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). On this basis, the article shows how the cultural analysis of law advanced by Kahn can help us to sharpen our sensibilities with regard to the deeper layers of moral and political meaning that EU law expounds and to thereby enable us to expand our horizons as well as conversations on the socio-political and economic composition of EU law. Yet this article also raises skepticism about the cultural study of EU law’s rule. Given the diverse cultural idiosyncrasies and traditions by which citizens of EU Member States live, it questions whether EU law can be assessed from the point of view of a collective identity believed to best persuade EU citizens of the authority of EU law.

The article argues, based on results from massive online survey experiments, that, just as the utterances from ordinary conversation, legal rules can convey a surplus meaning, which is more than just the amalgam of the meanings of the words which are employed in the legal rule’s formulation. More precisely, the experiments check whether a typology of the types of this surplus meaning—pragmatic typology—describes adequately the psychological processing of, not only everyday speech, but also legal rules. In two experiments—total N = 733—we find that in morally neutral cases the pragmatic typology adequately describes the psychological processes involved in the interpretation of a legal rule. However, we also find that in morally valenced cases, it is rather the moral inferences carried by participants that shape the pragmatic inferences than the other way around.

The comprehensible style of legal texts seems to be a predominantly linguistic problem. This is how the plain-legal-language movements present it. But, while plain-language statutes have been on the agenda for decades in every civilised country, laws still become more and more complicated. The paper attempts to explain this controversy. First, it argues that comprehensibility has more aspects beyond the linguistic or stylistic one. Sometimes it is the linguistically simplest texts that raise the most serious comprehensibility problems. The paper refers to two pieces of corpus linguistic research that provide evidence that vocabulary and grammar in themselves do not explain the incomprehensibility of the legal texts. Second, for a more subtle handling of the comprehensibility problem, the paper offers a framework of three typical pragmatic situations – the processual, the problem-solving and the compliance settings – where comprehensibility problems arise in different ways. The conclusion of the paper is that, contrary to the usual explanation that the main reason for incomprehensibility is that, in law, clarity and accuracy can be only employed at each other's expense, it is rather the systemic and interpretive character of law and the growing importance of technical rules that hinder the understanding of legal texts.