On the Use of Cognitive Linguistics to Explore Legal Concepts: Judicial Interpretation of Privacy Law in the European Union

The quest for how legal concepts generate and reproduce themselves and how those concepts are applied to specific cases is one of the most intractable and difficult to answer. This is even more true when old concepts are used to understand new realities. Traditional legal methods used to trace the power of precedent on courts still struggle to capture intricate, if not more subtle, conceptual change. This paper investigates the conceptual links throughout the precedent chain using the guiding hand of cognitive linguistics; namely, conceptual metaphor. Using computer-aided coding methodology to explore the use of metaphor to build conceptual structure concerning data control in EU law as a case study, this work analyses the recent 'Safe Harbor' case in the European Court of Justice and its chain of case citations to provide a proof of method to show the viability of using cognitive linguistics to explain notions of coherence, interpretation, conceptual change, and the power of precedent. The goal is to lead to a larger forecasting model of legal scholarship. It addresses the questions: how can metaphor analysis help clarify the transfer and interpretation of legal concepts throughout a chain of precedent and understand the concepts through which data privacy via traditional privacy are built as a case study? The scaffolding on which the law's abstract concepts are built is taken apart to reveal the underlying, non-abstract components of how ideas link together and affect conceptual transformation. This paper argues for a supplement to the traditional method of legal category building and holds out an extended arm from the world of cognitive linguists to the conceptual mores that is law.