Law Commons^™

Legal Corpus Linguistics And The Half-Empirical Attitude, Anya Bernstein

Journal Articles

Legal writers have recently turned to corpus linguistics to interpret legal texts. Corpus linguistics, a social-science methodology, provides a sophisticated way to analyze large data sets of language use. Legal proponents have touted it as giving empirical grounding to claims about ordinary language, which pervade legal interpretation. But legal corpus linguistics cannot deliver on that promise because it ignores the crucial contexts in which legal language is produced, interpreted, and deployed.

First, legal corpus linguistics neglects the relevant legal context—the conditions that give legal language authority. Because of this, legal corpus studies’ evidence about language use perversely obscures and misstates …

Legal Positivism As A Theory Of Law’S Existence: A Comment On Margaret Martin’S "Judging Positivism", Jorge Luis Fabra-Zamora

Journal Articles

This comment critically examines the conception of legal positivism that informs Margaret Martin’s interesting and multilayered challenge against the substance and method of this intellectual tradition. My central claim is that her characterization of the substantive theory of legal positivism sets aside a more fundamental and explanatory prior dimension concerning the positivist’s theory of the existence of legal systems and legal norms. I also argue that her understanding of the positivist’s descriptive methodology as a nonnormative project is too demanding and overlooks both the relationships between law and morality recognized by contemporary legal positivists and the pivotal distinction between internal …

Legal Pluralism And Analytical Jurisprudence: An Inapposite Contrast, Jorge Luis Fabra-Zamora

Journal Articles

The intellectual tradition of legal pluralism characterizes itself by way of a contrast to legal centralism or monism. Self-styled pluralists typically attribute centralist and monist views to mainstream theories of law, which I call here analytical jurisprudence. This article argues that the pluralist foundational contrast with analytical jurisprudence suffers from three recurrent defects. First, the pluralist opposition to analytical jurisprudence conflates conceptual questions with empirical, doctrinal, and politico-moral inquiries. Second, pluralists misattribute to analytical jurisprudents an equation between law and state that they do not hold and have the resources to reject. Third, pluralists address the conceptual problems of legal …