European Directives (EUDs) are binding upon Member States as to the results to be achieved, but leave to national authorities the choice of form and methods. Therefore, Member States adopt ad hoc National Implementing Measures (NIMs) that mostly reproduce the contents of EUDs and transpose them into domestic legislation. This well-known process is defined as “legal harmonization” and consists of the gradual, although ambiguous, approximation of national legal orders as a result of the adoption of European legislation. In order to contribute to the analysis of this phenomenon, we collect a large and unique dataset composed of European and domestic legislative sources, which is an essential requirement to automatically pair EUDs and the corresponding NIMs, in light of their semantic similarity. The first results show the feasibility of the proposed task to discern NIMs from national legislation that does not contribute to implementing EUDs, thus constituting the foundation for a semantic search engine. We believe that our effort can promote future applications and research directions, with the ultimate aim to support traditional legal methodology, facilitate citizens’ access to rights, support public administrations, and, more in general, promote democracy and the rule of law in the European Union.
Data and source code are available at https://doi.org/10.17632/mkx5sb3mnw