Sandro Nielsen: Legal Lexicography in Theory and Practice This article was first printed in: Estudios de Lexicografía. Revista Mensual del Grupo de Las Dos Vidas de Las Palabras. Número 4, Junio de 2015: 111-120. Sandro Nielsen Legal Lexicography in Theory and Practice 1. Introduction Dictionaries that provide help in communicative and cognitive situations are important information tools in today’s society, in particular when two different languages and legal systems are involved. Researchers at Centre for Lexicography, Aarhus University, Denmark, have been involved in theoretical and practical lexicographic work related to the field of law since the late 1980s, so this work is a significant part of the Centre’s output throughout the years. Researchers connected with the Centre in various ways have published several print dictionaries: an English-Danish dictionary of law, a Spanish-Danish dictionary of law, a German-Danish dictionary of law, and a Danish- German dictionary of law. In addition, one online Danish-English law dictionary has been made available and the English-Danish dictionary mentioned above is now only available as a revised and updated online dictionary. The theoretical work on legal lexicography has centred on developing principles for an English-Danish contract law dictionary (Nielsen 1994) and the lexicographic treatment of cultural differences in Danish and Spanish succession law. New insights into principles and practices of legal lexicography have been published in papers on an ongoing basis (see e.g. Nielsen 2000, Nielsen 2001, Nielsen 2010 and Nielsen 2012). The following presentation of a new project involving legal lexicography is partly based on Nielsen (2014). 2. Introducing the project on legal lexicography The digitalization of information activities and information tools has influenced lexicographic theory and practice, in particular during the last 10 to 15 years. One outcome of this general trend is that print dictionaries have gradually been replaced by online dictionaries and many online dictionaries, sometimes completely new, have been made available. Online dictionaries compete with internet search engines as providers of data that users can process into useful information, but internet search engines tend to provide so many results from searches in unstructured data environments that the results are often irrelevant to searches for specific information. Lexicographers can remedy this situation by developing theories and principles that enable them to design online dictionaries that allow users to access structured data with targeted searches and compilers to present search results in structured and adapted ways. The project is based on the modern theory of dictionary functions and this theoretical foundation determines all lexicographic decisions from the selection of entry words, over the selection of data types, to the way in which the data are presented. The lexicographers make their decision with due regard to the basic needs of the intended users identified through a user profiling exercise (see e.g. Bergenholtz & Nielsen 2006: 286) and attempt to match those needs with the dictionary function(s). The project aims to develop a database that can serve as the core of a set of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries designed to help Danish legal practitioners and scholars,