EAGAN, Minn. – Thomson Reuters has just released Black’s Law Dictionary, 10th Edition. For more than a century, Black’s Law Dictionary has been the gold standard for ensuring a common understanding of the growing language of law. It is also the most widely cited resource in legal arguments and judicial opinions.

Edited by Bryan A. Garner, the world’s leading legal lexicographer, the 10th Edition is the most authoritative, comprehensive law dictionary ever published. It contains more than 50,000 terms, including 7,500 new entries. Some are likely familiar to a casual newspaper reader, such as bioweapon, hacker, and zero-tolerance law. Others are legal slang or terms of art used in courts, law firms, law schools, and government offices, including affluenza defense, cryptanalysis, gazump, legaldegook, intrapreneur, mommy track, one-bite rule, psephology, and unperson.

“My team and I have tried hard to make Black’s Law Dictionary the most thorough, scholarly work ever to have marshaled the legal vocabulary,” said Garner. “It is crucial for every lawyer to understand how legal terms are used. And of course that knowledge is the hallmark of a cultivated mind.”

In addition to the new terms – each reviewed for accuracy by attorneys across the country – there are also more than 16,000 new definitions and expanded bibliographic coverage, with more than twice as many sources quoted and cited than in the 9th Edition. The new Black’s is the only legal dictionary to include the earliest known dates in English-language contexts for nearly all terms. Its coverage of Latin maxims has also been greatly expanded, with 900 new maxims added.

“We’re pleased to be able to offer such a major revision to our most popular and esteemed title,” said Andy Martens, global head of Product and Editorial for Thomson Reuters. “The law is understood and enforced according to the words that define it, making Black’s Law Dictionary as important to the practice of law as is our common understanding of its language.”

To learn more about Black’s Law Dictionary and to see definitions of the terms mentioned above, please visit legalcurrent.com.

Thomson Reuters
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Bryan A. Garner
Professor Garner is president of LawProse, Inc. of Dallas and serves as distinguished research professor of law at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of more than 20 books, including Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage (3d ed. 2011), Garner’s Modern American Usage (3d ed. 2009), andLegal Writing in Plain English (2d 2013). For Thomson Reuters, he has coauthored two books with Justice Antonin Scalia, Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges (2008) and Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts (2012). For more information, go to www.lawprose.org.