Lex can sometimes be translated as legislation, statute, statutory law or even act, even if the corresponding legislatio, statutus and actus also exist.
For instance, the German motto Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit (literally Unity and law and freedom) has been translated as Unity and justice and freedom, even though there is a different word for justice (Gerechtigkeit).
Present day continental law schools and faculties claim to study ius.
Even excellent translation cannot capture all the connotations of the original words, however, and many scholars argue for bilingual judges who can parse both versions of the text.
Nevertheless, the English and French texts of important may not translate exactly, which leaves open the possibility that justices may understand the same law to mean two different things.
For example, Osgoode Hall scholar Robert Leckey argues that in the 2006 Multani case over the banning of kirpans (Sikh ceremonial daggers) by a school board in Quebec, the justices of the Supreme Court of Canada, despite all writing their reasons in French, disagreed over the meaning of the phrase "ne peuvent être restreints que par une règle de droit" in Section 1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which appears in the English version of the text as "not prescribed by law".
[1][2] This difference between English and other European languages is sometimes invoked in the debates between legal positivism, natural law and interpretivism.
Berkowitz (2005) argues that the rise of legal positivism corresponds to a "transformation of the sense of 'law', a difficult topic made more so by a particular limitation of the English language", the non-distinction between ius and lex.