The International
Journal of
Speech,
Language
and the Law
ijsll (print) issn -
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Review
Legal Lexicography: A Comparative Perspective
Máirtín Mac Aodha (ed.)
Ashgate 2014 360pp
Reviewed by Marcus Galdia
The reviewed publication assembles contributions relating to numerous diachronic and synchronic aspects of legal lexicography. According to its subtitle,
the book aims at illuminating the legal-lexicographic problems under discussion
from a comparative perspective. The book consists of an introduction, main contributions, and indices for the English- and for the French-language chapters
along with supporting information such as notes about the contributors. The collective work has been edited by M. Mac Aodha.
The publication includes 15 chapters composed by 17 authors. I will deal with
them in the order they appear in the book. However, in order to make the underlying structure of the publication more transparent, I will introduce the contributions within thematic blocks that are not specifically marked in the book. Subsequently, I will examine some contributions again in the final part of my review
within a more general reflection on the main problems discussed in the book.
The first thematic block deals with the history of legal lexicography. In its first
contribution, ‘A View of French Legal Lexicography – Tradition and Change
from a Doctrinal Genre to the Modern Era’ by Pierre-Nicolas Barenot, a historical overview of French legal dictionaries is given. A glimpse at the background
of traditional French legal-lexicographic works, which is found in the ancient
Roman and mediaeval legal-lexicographic traditions, is presented as well. The
Affiliation
International University of Monaco
email: [email protected]
ijsll vol 22.2 15 255–260
©, equinox publishing
doi : 10.1558/ijsll.v22i2.28335
256 the international journal of speech, language and the law
editor’s decision to start the book with this article is understandable, since French
lexicographers set patterns for the development of professional legal-lexicographic work in Continental Europe. Also, the structure of many contemporary
legal dictionaries and related text types, such as legal encyclopaedias in Europe
and elsewhere, is based on the conceptual work of Sirey and Dalloz. The contribution is strictly historical, so that newer developments in French legal lexicography of the twentieth century are not covered. However, a page or two on
contemporary development would be welcome in a publication that is directed
mainly at non-French readers. It would clearly increase the value of the contribution within the general conception of the book, since the French influence upon
modern lexicographic works would be illustrated more fully. Yet, the author is a
historian, and I have to acknowledge the historian’s perspective that is focused on
the past. I might add as a slight criticism that the author refers on p. 26 to works
by Guillien/Vincent (1970) and Cornu (1987) that are, however, missing from
the bibliography.
The second contribution by Ian Lancashire and Janet Damianopoulos, ‘The
Early Modern English Law Lexicon’, canvasses the development of English legal
lexicography in a way that methodically resembles the approach by P. N. Barenot
in the previous chapter. It describes the methods used mainly by John Rastell,
Thomas Cromwell, Richard Tottel, John Cowell, Thomas Blount and Thomas
Manley, concentrating on the approach and modifications which they introduced
into the established body of legal-terminological literature. The contribution is
limited to the ‘Early Modern Period’ and therefore does not go beyond the seventeenth century, notwithstanding some occasional references to eighteenth-century legal-lexicographic publications.
The second block of the book deals with practical and theoretical issues in contemporary legal lexicography. Its first contribution by Bryan A. Garner, ‘Legal
Lexicography: A View from the Front Lines’, focuses on a relatively new product
that is the Black’s Law Dictionary, at least when seen from the historical perspective introduced by Lancashire and Damianopoulos. There is a gap in the historical development between the ‘Early Modern Period’ characterised in the preceding chapters and the period covered by Garner, but it is bridged by some general
comments on shape and content of English-language legal reference literature
that starts in England in the eighteenth century. Classical legal-lexicographic text
types were formed and developed in this period. Meanwhile, Garner is a practitioner and the editor-in-chief of the authoritative Black’s Dictionary, and his
chapter aims mainly to characterise the century-long evolution of this dictionary. It includes many valuable comments and recommendations which may be
of particular interest to less experienced lexicographers. This line of argument is
continued by Daniel Greenberg in ‘The Challenges of Compiling a Legal Diction-
review 257
ary’, which also comments on some traditional lexicographic issues such as the
difference between legal dictionaries and legal encyclopaedias as well as between
legal and judicial dictionaries (a text type particularly of interest to common-law
countries). Coen J. P. van Laer, in ‘Bilingual Legal Dictionaries: Comparison
without Precision?’, takes a step towards the comparative aspect in legal-lexicographic work. His approach, which is based on the method of comparative law, is
illustrated with numerous convincing analyses of legal terms. This chapter makes
plain the interrelation between legal lexicography and comparative law in terms
of method and practice.
Pierre Lerat continues in his French-language article ‘Pour des dictionnaires
juridiques multilingues du citoyen de l’Union européenne’ the survey of lexicographic problems in a relatively new area, which covers the terminology of the
uniform yet multilingual law of the European Union. Problems of standardisation of terminological research are discussed by Thierry Grass in his French-language contribution ‘Principes terminologiques pour la constitution d’une base de
données pour la traduction juridique’. An additional aspect of research into legal
terminology and its portrayal in legal dictionaries is discussed by Marta Chroma
in ‘Translation and the Law Dictionary’ from the perspective of legal translators,
who constitute one of the most important user groups of such works. Chroma’s
argument is further developed by Peter Sandrini in ‘Multilingual Legal Terminology in a Paper Dictionary’, where the structural problems of legal dictionaries are
reflected upon from the translatological perspective.
In Sandro Nielsen’s ‘Database of Legal Terms for Communicative and Knowledge Information Tools’, epistemological issues of legal-lexicographic work are
identified and analysed. The author stresses that fundamental lexicographic
problems are not overcome by technological changes that may make paper dictionaries obsolete in the future. Defining the aims of the dictionary and determining the range of possible users and the structure of included information are
challenges to lexicographers, notwithstanding the medium in which the legal
dictionary appears. Particularly valuable in this chapter is the method of user
profiling that aims at determining users’ needs and skills in a methodologically
founded way. In some contributions to the book, the question of who actually are
the users of legal dictionaries is approached rather speculatively; in some others,
it is assumed that legal dictionaries are compiled for legal translators or beginning law students.
The third block concentrates on the interface of lexicology and lexi­cography.
The first contribution by Christopher Hutton, ‘Defining Ordinary Words for
Mundane Objects: Legal Lexicography, Ordinary Language and the Word Vehicle’, deals with a lexicological challenge that is the practical determination of the
domain of legal language. In fact, while some terms are clearly legal and there-
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fore belong to a legal dictionary, others may appear controversial in this respect.
Among them are words used in daily parlance such as vehicle, discussed by Hutton on the basis of numerous precedents from common-law court decisions and
other text samples. In Mathieu Devinat’s ‘Establishing Meaning in a Bilingual and
Bijural Context: Dictionary Use at the Supreme Court of Canada’, strategies used
by judges in a bilingual jurisdiction are analysed in terms of meaning constitution in parallel English- and French-language texts. The author highlights judges’
work with dictionaries that is reported in numerous court decisions. According
to the author, ‘judges establish meaning’ through semantic analyses (p. 205) that
are supported by work with dictionaries. Likewise, some researchers within the
area of legal linguistics (including the author of this review) have investigated the
role that lexicographic reference plays in the process of meaning constitution in
court opinions. One could therefore also assume that judges justify their decisions through reference to existing lexicographic works. Meaning in institutionalised contexts would not be decoded with the help of dictionaries, but created
due to the institutional privilege of courts to determine meaning. The chapter
in question is, however, rather supportive of the contrary view. Patrick Forget,
in ‘La phraséologie chez des jurilexicographes: les exemples linguistiques dans
la deuxième edition du Dictionnaire de droit privé et lexique bilingues’, analyses
examples taken from a dictionary in relation to the clarification of the notion of
‘legal language’. In particular, Forget’s detailed lexicological analyses are guided
by the question of whether the information included in the dictionary and its
structure contribute added value to the user.
Finally, in the fourth block, which is devoted to coherence and adequacy in
bilingual legal dictionaries of lesser-used legal languages, Malachy O’Rourke discusses in ‘Inconsistencies in the Sources and Use of Irish Legal Terminology’ the
problems related to the coinage of Irish legal terms. The main strategy of such an
approach is to render the common law in Irish in a self-explanatory way, i.e. independently of the reference to the English terms. Ireland has a well-established
tradition in dealing with this task, yet O’Rourke shows in his meticulous analysis of Irish equivalents of the English common-law terms that a more consistent
language policy would be of benefit to legal-lexicographic work. The linguistic
subtleties in numerous examples quoted in this chapter are, however, accessible
solely to readers with an excellent command of the Gaelic language. Nevertheless,
the part concerning the role of Irish as a lesser-used legal language in the legislation of the European Union is beneficial also to readers with limited knowledge
of Gaelic.
The problems of legal terminology in lesser-used legal languages are scrutinised also by Māmari Stephens and Mary Boyce in ‘The Struggle for Civic
Space between a Minority Legal Language and a Dominant Legal Language: The
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Case of Māori and English’. The chapter focuses on methodological aspects of
identifying legal terms in existing Māori texts. It also establishes a framework
for the description of legal Māori in synchronic and diachronic perspectives.
Unlike the author of the preceding chapter, the authors of this chapter highlight
the method for identifying and listing legal Māori terms rather than their adequa­cy in particular cases. Both authors lend themselves very skilfully to the task
of making understandable the problems related to a language that is rarely used
in legal settings. Therefore, the chapter can be read unproblematically without
any knowledge of Māori. What is more, the authors also show that the results
achieved in their work on the Legal Māori Project can be fruitfully generalised
within a broader debate about the conceptual fundamentals of legal lexicography.
After this chapter, the book concludes with thorough and helpful indices for the
English-language and French-language chapters.
In retrospect, Legal Lexicography appears to me to be an interesting compilation
of chapters about classical and contemporary legal-lexicographic issues. From the
legal-linguistic point of view it is revealing to notice that many unsolved problems in general legal linguistics reappear in detailed analyses in the book. Issues
such as 1) what is legal language and which lexemes belong to it? 2) the definition
of the legal dictionary as a text type different from the legal encyclopaedia, and 3)
the difference between a legal thesaurus (which portrays the totality of the legal
discourse) and a legal dictionary (which responds to the needs of law students or
legal translators) illustrate the degree to which legal lexicography depends on the
state of the art in more theoretical legal linguistics. Many chapters in the collection convincingly show the close interrelationship between the practice of legal
lexicography and the lexicological aspects of legal linguistic research.
My final paragraphs will be devoted mainly to some critical points. The book
starts with an Introduction, which is unattributed. In it a brief essay that touches
unsystematically upon some historical and methodological problems of legal
lexi­cography is presented to the reader. In the main part of the Introduction, the
chapters that follow in the book are cursorily summarised. I found this procedure
rather unproductive. As publications dealing with fundamentals of legal lexicography are rare, it would be more helpful to introduce the readers systematically
to the state of the art that the following chapters represent. Instead, readers less
familiar with the profession will have to distil for themselves the problems and
the methodological principles of contemporary legal lexicography from each
chapter. Such a task may overburden students and other readers who are mainly
interested in theoretical aspects of legal lexicography. The usefulness of the book
would increase greatly if an introduction to legal lexicography instead of an introduction to the book were presented to the reader in the first place. Based on a
solid Introduction, the collection of chapters could then function as a reference
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book about its main topic. I assume that this was also the aim behind the edited
collection project.
Although the book claims to be construed from a comparative perspective, the
reader will discover in most chapters at best a geographic and linguistic pluralism
in the choice of topics and examples. Most articles are not really comparative;
they are based structurally upon scrutiny of terms as they illustrate the problems
with examples taken from multilingual sources. For instance, historical aspects
of the structure of legal dictionaries are discussed in the first chapter with regard
to the French tradition, and in the second chapter with regard to the English
tradition. This is parallelism, not comparison. The comparison of materials is
in this case left to be accomplished by the reader. Some of the chapters follow
the contrastive rather than the comparative method, which is unavoidable when
multilingual legal terminology is scrutinised. However, I would expect the comparative perspective to dominate the book as a methodological approach to the
issue and not as an unavoidable way of presenting and discussing multilingual
terminology. I concede that in a broader sense of the term ‘comparison’ the book
might be perceived as representing a comparative approach as distinct from a
purely monolingual orientation. In such a case, however, every publication that
deals with bilingual terminology would have to be labelled comparative. In my
view, the title and the subtitle of the book could reflect its profile more precisely. I
also deplore that the background to the editorial project is not communicated to
the reader. Not only the reviewer but also sociologists need reasons for researchers from many countries coming together to conceive of and compile a common
publication. I have to respect the editor’s decision to remain silent on this issue,
yet I generally prefer more transparency in the process of the development of
knowledge.
My critical remarks above concern mainly the structure of the collective project as such rather than the quality of particular contributions. These remarks
may also reflect the general risk of structural and methodological coordination
inherent in this type of collective publication. Meanwhile, Legal Lexicography is a
welcome first step towards further systematisation of legal-lexicographic studies.
The chapters presented in the collection are thoroughly researched and illuminating within their clearly defined epistemic scope and practical impact.