NEW LAW BOOKS.
// is the intention of The Green Bag to have its book reviews written by competent reviewers. The usual custom of magazines is to confine book notices to books sent in for review. At the request of subscribers, however, The Green Bag will be glad to review or notice any recently published law book, whether re ceivedfor review or not. THE JUDICIAL DICTIONARY OF WORDS AND PHRASES JUDICIALLY INTERPRETED, to which has been added statutory Definitions. By F'. Stroud, of Lincoln's Inn, BarristerAt-Law, Recorder of Tewkesbury. 3 Vols. Second Edition. Boston: Boston Book Company. 1903. (pp. ccxxvii+23O2.) It would perhaps be exaggeration or in accurate—and the reviewer of a Dictionary should not use his words amiss—to term Stroud's Judicial Dictionary indispensable to judge, practitioner or student of the law. Generation after generation has got on indifferently well without such a work; the Bench and the Bar have kept com monplace-books in which judicial inter pretations of words and phrases have been noted or jotted down for immediate use or future reference; but no systematic sur vey of the field of judicial interpretation was ever made with an attempt to arrange and to bring under the eye scattered and obscure meaning of words contained in the com mon law, statute and judgments of the courts. Mr. Stroud undertook this collossal task and has accomplished it in a way to lay the profession under a deep and lasting obliga tion. In the first edition of 1890, he opens his preface with the statement that "This work in no sense competes with, nor does it cover the same ground as [the various law dictionaries]. As its name imports, k is a Dictionary of the English language (in its phrases as well as single words), so far as that language has received interpretation by the judges." In the second paragraph Mr. Stroud ex presses the sources and authorities upon which he has relied, and it cannot be better presented fhan in his own words. 'The
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decisions of the English judges," he says, "are, and will remain, the central source whence this authoritative exposition must come, though Irish, Scotch, and Colonial decisions should harmonize and amplify. To formulate the English judicial interpreta tions from the earliest times down to the end of the nineteenth century and therewith to blend the statutory definitions of the High Court of Parliament has been the endeavor of this edition; incorporating a not inconsid erable treatment of Irish decisions, and some from Scotland and the United States." The last clause expresses the limitations of the work—necessary limitations from an English standpoint. In this one regard the American lawyer may complain, but the crit icism reaches the scope, not the workman ship. A Dictionary is a fascinating work. A study of the definitions of words cultivates, if it does not form, the habit of exactness, and the quotations by which the meanings are illustrated often throw strange lights on the growth of usage and the change of language. If it be true, as Professor Lounsbury points out in his charming little work— The Stand ard of Pronunciation in English,—that no one standard is possible in matters of pro nunciation, the fact remains that written language is capable of exact discrimination and definition. The Dictionary registers what intelligent scholarship considers cor rect usage. "Nor is a Dictionary a bad book to read," says Emerson, as quoted by Mr. Stroud. "There is no cant in it, no ex cess of explanation, and it is full of sugges tion." The study of dictionaries has always been considered an admirable if not an indispensa ble preparation for the orator by profession, or indeed for the man who occasionally ad dresses the public. The oratorical suprem acy of Chatham will not be disputed. In ad dition to translating the classics into English, he studied the masters of English. "As a means of acquiring copiousness of diction and an exact choice of words," says Dr. Goodrich in his excellent collection of select British eloquence, "Mr. Pitt also read and
