Law Commons^™

Technologically Improving Textualism, Jeffrey W. Stempel, Erik S. Knutsen

Nevada Law Journal Forum

The textualist approach to construing statutes, regulations, contracts, and other documents remains dominant but has drawbacks, most significantly its tendency to disregard probative evidence of textual meaning in favor of isolated judicial impressions and dictionary definitions. Although a broader, contextual, “integrative” approach to interpretation is preferable, the hegemony of textualism, even extreme textualism, is unlikely to recede soon. Textualism can be substantially improved, however, through effective use of a form of big data—the corpus linguistics approach to discerning word meaning. By enlarging the universe of sources about how words are actually used, corpus linguistics represents a significant improvement over imperial …

Endogenous And Dangerous, Brian N. Larson

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’S Copyright Jurisprudence, Ryan Vacca, Ann Bartow

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court’S Chief Justice Of Intellectual Property Law, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Judicial Consensus: Why The Supreme Court Should Decide Its Cases Unanimously, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

Like Congress and other deliberative bodies, the Supreme Court decides its cases by majority vote. If at least five of the nine Justices come to an agreement, their view prevails. But why is that the case? Majority voting for the Court is not spelled out in the Constitution, a federal statute, or Supreme Court rules.

Nor it is obvious that the Court should decide by a majority vote. When the public votes on a ballot measure, it typically makes sense to follow the majority. The general will of the electorate ought to govern. But judicial decisions are not supposed to …