MEASURING THE HARMONIZATION DISTANCE WITHIN THE LEGAL SPACE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION AS A TOPOLOGICAL SPACE
MEASURING THE HARMONIZATION DISTANCE WITHIN THE LEGAL SPACE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION AS A TOPOLOGICAL SPACE

Summary/Abstract: The present study starts from the general concept of legal space, viewed from a topological perspective, as a set of legal norms and judicial decisions, on which a structure is built upon: the legal order. Within the legal space, phenomena characteristic of orderly pluralism occurs, among which is one of the utmost importance - legal harmonisation. Of different amplitudes, the harmonisation could be confined to the adoption of common minimum rules or, on the contrary, it could reach the proximity of the unification. Treating the legal space of the European Union or any of its legal sub-spaces, for example, the space of justice or the space of substantive criminal law of the Union, can be useful for many purposes, including that of concrete, numerical measurement of the harmonisation distance, that is, the distance between the norm of a Member State transposing a directive and the harmonisation rule established by that directive. The application we developed uses the "chi-square distance", as a mathematical method of measuring the harmonisation distance. Such methods, resulting from the topological vision of the European Union's legal space, can be useful as tools for establishing of good practices, for self-evaluation of the Member States in their transposition practices or for evaluating by the European Commission of the transposition into national law of the harmonisation rules established by directives.

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