A difficult matter to plead before European courts

British lawyer Ian Forrester describes Europe's procedurally mind-blowing Court of First Instance, which judges cases relating to European law. "The president of the Court, Bo Vesterdorf, is Danish and presides over a court whose working language is French, but where most of the appeals heard are in English. Being a barrister for the defence at Luxemburg is a unique experience. In a court where judges come from the 27 member countries, statistics confirm that the mother tongue of most of the judges sitting in an ordinary five-member chamber will be different from the language in which the case will be heard. If a barrister speaks too quickly, the (highly qualified) interpreter will have to leave out or simplify some ideas... Latin was once the language of the learned. It was probably to difficult to speak, and people doubtless used neologisms and made grammatical mistakes, but at least they understood each other."

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