Translegal Learner's Dictionary of Law/Studentenwörterbuch zum englischen Recht

Translegal has put a learner's dictionary of law online. The price is $19.95 per year (that's about 13.30 euros at the moment). There are 2,500 entries and there will be more. Details of the dictionary show the editor as Matt Firth, who is British and educated in English and French law and English as a foreign language (to use an overbroad term), and has been involved in teaching English to foreign lawyers for many years now. There are also seven authors and a senior consultant, all highly qualified. If you click on one of the words in the dictionary, you can see a definition and a warning that in order to see the full entry you need to pay the one-year licence fee. I haven't done this yet, although I probably will. The dictionary does look excellent. My quibbles are minor and follow below. First of all, there is a page online comparing the entry for decree in Black's Law Dictionary and in the Learn's Dictionary of Law: go to this page and click on See the difference! Now, I never succeed in convincing people that Black's Law Dictionary is not the answer to all their problems. In my opinion it is far too wide and vague to be relied on. But it has improved since the seventh edition, the first one edited by Bryan Garner. I do think it is very deceptive advertising of TransLegal to quote the sixth or earlier edition on decree. But that edition too had a great reputation, and I think this quote shows the kind of old-fashioned and confused definition Black's has always been full of (probably par for the course when it first came out) and of which there is distinctly less since Garner took over. Having said that, the extract from the Learner's Dictionary shows many sentence examples. The dictionary is apparently based on a number of concordances, but I imagine that many of the example sentences are not from corpora but invented as teaching material. Any student required to write legal English is going to need this kind of thing and this dictionary makes it available at the time it's needed. I have a minor quibble on the note that decree to mean judgment is considered rather outdated, but in the US it is used for a divorce decree. But it's used in the UK for divorce decree too! I do not know if the dictionary contains a lot of UK/US distinctions, but they are clearly a problem. I think lawyers will probably learn mainly UK or mainly US usage when they are studying in or about those countries, and not from a learner's dictionary - perhaps a big reference work is needed to consult occasionally, but I don't think that exists. In a recent comment, Matt Firth made a remarks about teaching UK/US legal English that also relativizes the issue, although I don't think I see things exactly the same way he does, but it would take ages to explain. Two final points: 1) TransLegal call this the world's first learner's Legal English dictionary: Our research methods ensure that not only is this the world's first learner's Legal English dictionary, but it is also the o…