The Languages of Valuation Law

Version 1.1.0 (7 October 2026): corrections and clarifications; see the Journal's errata page (journal.valuation-engineer.com/index.php/vej/errata). Pages 139-146 of Vol. 1 No. 2 (formerly 129-136). Repaginated 5 October 2026: content unchanged; pages 129-136 of Vol. 1 No. 2 (formerly 125-132), following the version 1.1.0 corrections to the Foundations entries 000 and 007–010.A survey of valuation law conducted across jurisdictions whose law is written in thirty-five source languages — each treated jurisdiction's law counted once by language — in a journal that itself publishes in twelve, produced a result its author did not expect: the jurisdictions surveyed cluster by legal-linguistic lineage rather than by geography, and at least one apparent convergence between distant legal systems turns out on inspection to be partly common ancestry. This article sets out what the multilingual method revealed, distinguishes four ways in which a language carries law across borders, and corrects one point in the department's draft comparative synthesis.