Books I have not read/Ungelesene Bücher

In a variation of the popular bloggers’ posts ‘Books I read in 2013’, ‘Books I read in December’ and so on, here are some books I haven’t read.

First of all, I was in Hammicks law bookshop yesterday because it was still open till 7 pm when I happened to pass it.

I didn’t buy Catherine Barnard’s tome on EU Employment Law although it looked like a good read, with quite some reference to individual countries. I had to admit I would not find time to read it. Had I wanted to, I could have got it cheaper second-hand or on Kindle (though I feel books you want to leaf through don’t work well on Kindle). EU law sometimes gets me down because I don’t know enough about it, and whether working through this book would help I don’t know – though I suspect it would

Nor did I buy Guide to Latin in International Law by Fellmeth and Horwitz. You can look inside at amazon. The Latin used in English law and the Latin used in German law are different, US law also uses different Latin and international law (with which I rarely have to do) probably uses a different one again. Not only that, but the pronunciation varies from country to country. There is some information on this in this book, but probably the two versions given, which are ‘American’ and ‘restored classical’ I think, are not enough to help those of us dealing with UK and German pronunciations. This book is not cheap. I liked the detailed explanations and layout. But again, I felt my life would be full enough without finding time to read it.

Similarly, I did not buy Rupert Haigh’s Oxford Handbook of Legal Correspondence. It’s for non-native speakers of English and it looks very good. I still don’t know how people really learn languages or learn legal English, but if they can learn something from a book, this may be a book for them – as are Rupert’s other books (see his website).

This list seems rather short, as there are very many other books I haven’t read, and it is very much biased to OUP. So here’s more: I saw a newer edition of the Barron’s Law Dictionary by Peter Gifis, which I have always liked, but I suspect the edition I have will suffice. But mine is nearly twenty years old, so maybe I should reconsider. You can get this as a paperback or for Kindle.

I also haven’t read The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law. I haven’t even had it in my hands, though. But I have mentioned it in an earlier post.

This will have to do for now, although I think I could write many more posts on this subject.

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