How can bilingual legal dictionaries be improved? This is the question addressed by Van Laer. The author argues that the provision of encyclopedic material is essential. He specifically makes the case for the inclusion of juxtaposed legislative definitions from both the source and the target legal systems to enable the dictionary user to bridge the conceptual gap between diverging legal systems. A note of caution is struck, however, as an overabundance of such information can in fact obscure rather than highlight conceptual differences. Only when the correct balance is struck between concision and completeness, the author suggests, can the question of equivalence truly be resolved.