Dictionaries - English, Law, and Others

Overview of Legal Dictionaries

You may be familiar with famous legal dictionaries such as Black's, Ballentine's, or Bouvier's. The library has many of the current and historical editions of these well-known volumes, as well as online versions of some, but did you know we have a variety of other legal dictionaries as well? See examples on the curated list below, check out the Specialized and Foreign Language Dictionaries, and go search for others!

To locate all law related dictionaries, please visit the SearchWorks catalog, change the search from "All Fields" to "Title," and then enter: law AND dictionary. Repeat with the terms: legal AND dictionary.

To find specific dictionaries not listed here, visit the SearchWorks catalog, change the search field from "All fields" to "Title" and try a few searches combining a likely title term with the word dictionary and law or legal. For example: modern AND legal AND dictionary.  

Dictionaries are available at the Robert Crown Law Library unless otherwise noted. The list is, for the most part, alphabetical by title.

Historical Editions

Current editions are shown first, followed by prior editions available to the Stanford community. 

If you are interested specifically in historical dictionaries, aside from the early editions listed here, try Georgetown's Digital Collection of dictionaries, or HeinOnline's Legal Classics library. 

To view the complete list of Black's Law Dictionaries available, see the box labeled "Black's" on this page. 

To view the complete list of Bouvier's Law Dictionaries available, see the box labeled Bouvier's on this page.