Legal Dictionaries

Also available online on law students' personal Westlaw accounts. For more information on finding American resources on personal accounts, see American Law in our Legal Research Manual.

When faced with legal language, does not knowing the terminology hinder your comprehension? The fully-updated third edition of The Dictionary of Selected Legal Terms is intended to reduce the complexity of legal definitions by providing clear and simple definitions of commonly used terms covering a wide variety of legal topics. The terms incorporated in this new edition were chosen specifically for this purpose, and the definitions have been prepared with the layperson in mind. This publication is a valuable resource for both non-lawyers and lawyers seeking accessible definitions to commonly used legal terms.

Prince’s Dictionary of Legal Abbreviations contains an extensive range of acronyms, abbreviations, and symbols found in primary and secondary sources of American legal literature.

Derived from the famous 1853 law dictionary used by Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Wolters Kluwer Bouvier Law Dictionary Desk Edition has been brought completely up-to-date by a distinguished and widely-published legal scholar and teacher. Steve Sheppard, with law degrees from Oxford and Columbia Universities, brings his scholarship, international practice, and litigation experience to bear in making the famous text as relevant today as it was when it first broke ground in American law. Definitions derived from contemporary as well as classic sources give the reference book its depth and authority. Building on Bouvier's structure and entries, Professor Sheppard has added thousands of new terms and rewritten many original definitions. 8,500 robust, paragraph-length entries explain more than 11,200 words and phrases, far more than the original two-volume set of 6,600.