Dictionaries are, apparently, popular book purchases, and this acknowledgement of consumer receptivity has prompted the publication of several specialist legal dictionaries over the past few months. The value of such books must in one sense be judged by the extent to which they can successfully compete with orthodox textbooks which endeavour, among other things, to provide thorough, rounded and intelligible expositions of the meaning of key terms and phrases. Yet, even though a little legal learning is a particularly dangerous thing, it must be conceded that, recognizing their limitations, dictionaries can supply very useful starting points. Certainly, for biographical details, a dictionary can be much more suitable than a range of books, and there has long been a need for an easy reliable place of reference for figures in the law.

For this book, Professor Simpson leads a team of 40 contributors, including many distinguished names. So far as the individual entries are concerned, he has been deliberately selective, including no living persons and only those deceased persons who had achieved prominence before 1939. No explanation is given for this. Certainly the rule is convenient for the compilers and avoids any supposed embarrassment that might result from excluding distinguished lawyers still living. But one is frequently interested to know about living persons, and it would scarcely have been an invidious task to make room for such leading judges and practitioners as Denning, Devlin, Donaldson and Mann, or such outstanding contributors to legal education and jurisprudence as Kahn-Freund, Morris and Hart (in fact, one of the contributors)— and if some of the latter names are not familiar to a wide audience, all the more reason for bringing them to its attention.