The second book of the week is Legal Lexicography: A Comparative Perspective, published last month by Ashgate and edited by Máirtín Mac Aodha, Council of the European Union, Belgium.

I have not been able to find any published reviews so far, but will try to post links as and when I come across them. In the meantime, you will find below some selected extracts from the publisher’s information.

“Legal lexicography or jurilexicography is the most neglected aspect of the discipline of jurilinguistics, despite its great relevance for translators, academics and comparative lawyers. This volume seeks to bridge this gap in legal literature by bringing together contributions from ten jurisdictions from leading experts in the field […]. Topics covered include the history of French legal lexicography, ordinary language as defined by the courts, the use of law dictionaries by the judiciary, legal lexicography and translation, and a proposed multilingual dictionary for the EU citizen. While the majority of contributions are in English, the volume includes three written in French.”

“Since Antiquity, legal glossaries and dictionaries have been compiled but seldom analysed. This versatile book fills the gap. It is most useful not only for the professionals of lexicography and terminology work, but also for all lawyers who want to know better the relevant sources of lexical information in their field.”
Heikki E.S. Mattila, University of Lapland, Finland

“As multilingual legal dictionaries are increasingly relied upon as points of entry for an understanding of the world’s different legal systems, this book will be a source of insight and delight for lawyers, judges, translators, linguists and comparative law scholars working anywhere that law and languages interact.”
Nicholas Kasirer, Justice of the Quebec Court of Appeal, Canada

Contents

• Introduction
• A View of French Legal Lexicography – Tradition and Change from a Doctrinal Genre to the Modern Era
• The Early Modern English Law Lexicon 
Legal Lexicography: A View from the Front Lines
• The Challenges of Compiling a Legal Dictionary
• Bilingual Legal Dictionaries: Comparison Without Precision?
• Pour des dictionnaires juridiques multilingues du citoyen de l’Union européenne
• Principes terminologiques pour la constitution d’une base de données pour la traduction juridique
• Translation and the Law Dictionary
• Multinational Legal Terminology in a Paper Dictionary?
• Database of Legal Terms for Communicative and Knowledge information Tools
• Defining Ordinary Words for Mundane Objects: Legal Lexicography, Ordinary
• Language and the Word Vehicle
• Establishing Meaning in a Bilingual and Bijural Context: Dictionary Use at the Supreme Court of Canada
• La phraséologie chez des jurilexicographes: les exemples linguistiques dans la deuxième édition du Dictionnaire de droit 
privé et lexiques bilingues
• Inconsistencies in the Sources and Use of Irish Legal Terminology
• The Struggle for Civic Space Between a Minority Legal Language and a Dominant Legal Language: The Case of Māori and English

Further information can be obtained from the publishers, Ashgate, here. A 10% discount is available at the time of writing this post.