English legal writer, poet, and biographer best remembered for his A New Law Dictionary (1729) which became the most popular of its kind in the newly-independent United States. Jacob is also remembered for his collection of biographies, Poetical Register, or Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets, (2 vols., 1719–20). However, Jacob's literary works were not as well-received as his legal ones, and he feuded with Alexander Pope publicly and in writing, culminating in Pope making Jacob a dunce in the 1728 edition of his The Dunciad.