Tax law

Twenty-third in the list is il principio di libera concorrenza, and it names the rule English calls the « arm’s length » principle. Compare the pictures. The Italian describes a market: the price two firms of the same group must use is the price free competition would have produced between strangers. The English describes a body. « At arm’s length » is a phrase about physical distance and the social distance that comes with it, since you hold somebody at arm’s length when you will not let them close, and the law borrowed it whole, so that a transaction « at arm’s length » is one between parties who keep each other at that reach. Both phrases reach the same test, but only one of them is a metaphor, and it is a metaphor the reader must already know: nothing in « arm », in « length » or in the preposition says anything about a price. Libera concorrenza says what it means with no picture at all, which is why the words turn up outside tax, in il diritto della concorrenza, and why the Spanish, French and Portuguese terms are built on that noun too.