He was best known, however, for his legal writings. Having himself experienced the difficulty of studying treatises based on British laws that no longer applied to the United States, Bouvier wrote his own American law dictionary, "Law Dictionary Adapted to the Constitution and Laws of the United States of America and of the Several States of the American Union" (1839). He hoped that being "written entirely anew, and calculated to remedy those defects, would be useful to the profession". It is believed to be the first legal dictionary to be based on American law. It was well received by bibliographer Samuel Austin Allibone and by other jurists including Chancellor James Kent of the New York Supreme Court and Justice Joseph Story of the United States Supreme Court. Bouvier himself revised and published new editions in 1843 and 1848. After his death, it continued to be updated and published, and was retitled "Bouvier's Law Dictionary" by Francis Rawle in 1897. Bouvier also published an edition of Matthew Bacon's "Abridgment of the Law" (10 vols, 1842-1846), and a compendium of American law entitled "The Institutes of American Law" (4 vols, 1851) that outlined legal principles such as bailment, contracts, and property.