A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage

New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Good/Good. xviii, [4], 587, [5] pages. Foreword by Thomas Reavley. Classified Guide. Pronunciation Guide. List of Abbreviations. Select Bibliography. The DJ has some wear, tears and soiling. Much of the book is in two-column format. Bryan Andrew Garner (born November 17, 1958) is an American legal scholar and lexicographer. As a student at the University of Texas School of Law in 1981, Garner began noticing odd usages in lawbooks, many of them dating back to Shakespeare. They became the source material for his first book, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. He has written more than two dozen books about English usage and style such as Garner's Modern English Usage for a general audience, and others for legal professionals. Garner also wrote two books with Justice Antonin Scalia: Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges and Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. He is the founder and president of LawProse Inc. Garner serves as Distinguished Research Professor of Law at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law. He is also a lecturer at his alma mater, the University of Texas School of Law. After receiving his Juris Doctor degree in 1984, he clerked for Judge Reavley of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit before he joined the Dallas firm of Carrington, Coleman, Sloman & Blumenthal. He then returned to the University of Texas School of Law and was named director of the Texas/Oxford Center for Legal Lexicography. In 1990, he founded LawProse Inc., which provides seminars on clear writing, briefing and editing for lawyers and judges. The ideal companion to standard legal references. In recent years, the need for clarity and precision in legal writing has been the subject of increasing attention. Until now, however, the unwieldy body of legal usage has remained uncollected and unscrutinized in any systematic way. The first comprehensive guide to style and usage for the legal writer, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage provides accessible, authoritative, and up-to-date information that will enable lawyers, judges, students, scholars, and those who work in other fields concerned with legal language--such as journalism, medicine, business, and finance--to make their legal writing as clear and precise as possible by resolving questions of phraseology, diction, grammar, and style. The entries, arranged alphabetically, discuss distinctions among variant forms of legal terms, expose common pitfalls in legal writing, and include brief essays on such special topics as metaphors, sexism, clichés, initialese, misspellings, preferred spellings, Latinisms, grammar, and distinctions of meaning. In addition, the entries are highlighted with illustrations from such sources as judicial opinions, statutes, briefs, and law review articles. While the focus of the dictionary is on American usage, this is augmented by numerous examples of British usage where appropriate; moreover, Garner discusses legal words not to be found in other dictionaries. Modern Legal Usage is the ideal companion to standard law dictionaries and fills an important gap in the existing legal reference literature. Offers comprehensive coverage and alphabetically arranged entries, contains over 6,000 headwords, provides a guide to pronunciation, gives clear, concise definitions, distinguishes between legal words that are closely related, discusses topics of interest to legal writers, lists preferred spellings, includes brief essays on points of grammar, uses numerous examples from legal documents, incorporates abundant cross-references.