Legal Lexicography: A Comparative Perspective ed. by Máirtín Mac Aodha (review)

From Llewellyn (1930) to Mertz (2007), scholars have likened learning the law to learning a language. Not only does the legal dictionary serve as a practical guide to the language of the law for students, translators, and legal interpreters, the scholarship of legal lexicography can also contribute to constructing a picture of the evolution and transformation of legal concepts over time and across jurisdictions.

Legal Lexicography, a volume edited by Máirtín Mac Aodha from the Council of the European Union (EU), brings together academic and practicing lexicographers from ten civil and common law jurisdictions, offering diverse accounts of the law dictionary in monolingual, bilingual and multilingual settings. Three of the fifteen chapters are written in French.¹

The array of papers included in the volume will be briefly surveyed here. The first two chapters have a historical focus. Pierre-Nicolas Barenot tracks the historical changes of French legal lexicography from the twelfth to the nineteenth century, highlighting the fact that legal dictionaries have always been encyclopedic and contain not only lexical definitions but also legal principles and norms; Ian Lancashire and Janet Damianopoulos offer a historical account of English legal dictionaries published between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, noting the contributions that legal dictionaries have made to the development of the English language (for example, the first monolingual English dictionary was published by lawyer John Rastell in about 1523).

The next two chapters are written by practicing legal lexicographers—Bryan A. Garner, editor-in-chief of Black’s Law Dictionary, and Daniel Greenberg, editor of Stroud’s Judicial Dictionary and general editor of Jowitt’s Dictionary of English Law. Both authors analyze the challenges in compiling a legal dictionary from the frontline, covering issues such as the distinction between a legal dictionary and an encyclopedia, the extent to which legal lexicography is a work of scholarship, the accuracy of data sources, and the difficulty in avoiding normative judgment.

A substantial portion of the book—chapters 5 to 9—deals with bilingual and multilingual legal dictionaries. Coen J. P. Van Laer compares lexicographic approaches of five bilingual European legal dictionaries, such as the encyclopedic information they carry; Pierre Lerat (in French) proposes a method of creating a multilingual legal database in the EU, emphasizing the concept as a starting point for every entry; Thierry Grass (in French) advocates the use of ISO² standards in legal translation, using a French-German terminological database as a case study; Marta Chroma contrasts the work of the legal translator and the task of compiling a bilingual legal dictionary; Peter Sandrini discusses a conceptual approach in the organization of a multilingual legal dictionary.

The rest of the book covers a wider range of issues. Sandro Nielsen presents methods of digitalizing print legal dictionaries and the benefits of online tools in access to data. Christopher Hutton confronts a fundamental challenge in legal lexicography: the distinction between legal language and ordinary language. Mathieu Devinat details the use of dictionaries by the Canadian Supreme Court. Patrick Forget (in French) analyses the “phraseological units” of entries from a bilingual dictionary. Malachy O’Rourke studies legal terminology in Irish and highlights inconsistencies in sources and usage. Māmari Stephens and Mary Boyce look at the tension between Maori and English—minority and dominant legal language.

A few common themes, consisting largely of categorical problems, cut across chapters in the volume. These problems are familiar struggles for any lexicographer, but they take on additional complexities in the legal context.

A recurring concern is the boundary between a dictionary and an encyclopedia. Since conceptual distinctions between legal terms often hinge on questions of legal principles and doctrines, it is sometimes difficult to tell apart the tasks of explaining the language of the law and explaining the law.

Encyclopedic information may be particularly desirable in the case of a bilingual legal dictionary, where a source language term has no equivalent in the...