English as a Legal Language Book

This text is designed as a plain language lawyer's guide to English legal terminology so that any practitioner, who is at a loss to express legal terms in English, can find the relevant set of terms and their usage by looking under a general subject heading. The guide may also be used to find explanations of words found in a translating dictionary. Finally, it may be used as a thesaurus that is organized according to topic or category and entered by means of an alphabetical index. Continental lawyers need English as a working language more and more, but often stumble over misconceptions when they try to convert it for their purposes. English legal language is rooted in Anglo-American legal tradition and the continental lawyer has difficulty appreciating the English word chosen without seeing how it fits into legal thinking and relates to other words in the subject area as a whole. The book offers a comparative lexicon of Anglo-American legal systems with EC law, and aims to be of value to any non-native English-speaking lawyer, but should be particularly useful for continental European lawyers.Read More