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Full-Text Articles in Law
Comments On James C. Phillips & Jesse Egbert, Advancing Law And Corpus Linguistics: Importing Principles And Practices From Survey And Content-Analysis Methodologies To Improve Corpus Design And Analysis, Edward Finegan
BYU Law Review
No abstract provided.
A Lawyer’S Introduction To Meaning In The Framework Of Corpus Linguistics, Neal Goldfarb
A Lawyer’S Introduction To Meaning In The Framework Of Corpus Linguistics, Neal Goldfarb
BYU Law Review
Corpus linguistics is more than just a new tool for legal interpretation. Work in corpus linguistics has generated new ways of thinking about word meaning and about the interpretation of words in context. These insights challenge the assumptions that lawyers and judges generally make about words and their meaning. Although the words that make up a sentence are generally regarded as the basic units of meaning, corpus analysis has shown that in many cases, the meaning of a word as it is used in a given context is a function, not of the word by itself, but of the word’s …
Triangulating Public Meaning: Corpus Linguistics, Immersion, And The Constitutional Record, Lawrence B. Solum
Triangulating Public Meaning: Corpus Linguistics, Immersion, And The Constitutional Record, Lawrence B. Solum
BYU Law Review
This Article contributes to the development of an originalist methodology by making the case for an approach that employs three distinct methods, each of which serves as a basis for confirming or questioning the results reached by the other two. This approach will be called the Method of Triangulation. The three component techniques are as follows: 1. The Method of Corpus Linguistics: The method of corpus linguistics employs large-scale data sets (corpora) that provide evidence of linguistic practice. 2. The Originalist Method of Immersion: The method of immersion requires researchers to immerse themselves in the linguistic and conceptual world of …
Evidence-Based Jurisprudence Meets Legal Linguistics—Unlikely Blends Made In Germany, Hanjo Hamann, Friedemann Vogel
Evidence-Based Jurisprudence Meets Legal Linguistics—Unlikely Blends Made In Germany, Hanjo Hamann, Friedemann Vogel
BYU Law Review
German legal thinking is renowned for its hair-splittingly sophisticated dogmatism. Yet, some of its other contributions to research are frequently overlooked, both at home and abroad. Two such secondary streams recently coalesced into a new corpus-based research approach to legal practice: Empirical legal research (which had already developed in Germany by 1913) and research on language and law (following German pragmatist philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work of 1953). This Article introduces both research traditions in their current German incarnations (Evidence-Based Jurisprudence and Legal Linguistics) and shows how three common features—their pragmatist observation of social practices, their interest in dissecting legal authority, …
Advancing Law And Corpus Linguistics: Importing Principles And Practices From Survey And Content Analysis Methodologies To Improve Corpus Design And Analysis, James C. Phillips, Jesse Egbert
Advancing Law And Corpus Linguistics: Importing Principles And Practices From Survey And Content Analysis Methodologies To Improve Corpus Design And Analysis, James C. Phillips, Jesse Egbert
BYU Law Review
The nascent field of law and corpus linguistics has much to offer legal interpretation. But to do so, it must more fully incorporate principles from survey and content-analysis methodologies used in the social sciences. Importing such will provide greater rigor, transparency, reproducibility, and accuracy in the important quest to determine the meaning of the law. This Article highlights some of those principles to provide a best- practices guide to those seeking to perform law and corpus linguistic analysis.
Corpus Linguistics As A Tool In Legal Interpretation, Lawrence M. Solan, Tammy Gales
Corpus Linguistics As A Tool In Legal Interpretation, Lawrence M. Solan, Tammy Gales
BYU Law Review
In this paper, we set out to explore conditions in which the use of large linguistic corpora can be optimally employed by judges and others tasked with construing authoritative legal documents. Linguistic corpora, sometimes containing billions of words, are a source of information about the distribution of language usage. Thus, corpora and the tools for using them are most likely to assist in addressing legal issues when the law considers the distribution of language usage to be legally relevant. As Thomas R. Lee and Stephen C. Mouritsen have so ably demonstrated in earlier work, corpus analysis is especially helpful when …
Ordinary Meaning And Corpus Linguistics, Stefan Th. Gries, Brian G. Slocum
Ordinary Meaning And Corpus Linguistics, Stefan Th. Gries, Brian G. Slocum
BYU Law Review
This Article discusses how corpus analysis, and similar empirically based methods of language study, can help inform judicial assessments about language meaning. We first briefly outline our view of legal language and interpretation in order to underscore the importance of the ordinary meaning doctrine, and thus the relevance of tools such as corpus analysis, to legal interpretation. Despite the heterogeneity of the judicial interpretive process, and the importance of the specific context relevant to the statute at issue, conventions of meaning that cut across contexts are a necessary aspect of legal interpretation. Because ordinary meaning must in some sense be …
Datamining The Meaning(S) Of Progress, Jake Linford
Datamining The Meaning(S) Of Progress, Jake Linford
BYU Law Review
No abstract provided.
Corpus Linguistics And The Criminal Law, Carissa Byrne Hessick
Corpus Linguistics And The Criminal Law, Carissa Byrne Hessick
BYU Law Review
This brief response to Ordinary Meaning and Corpus Linguistics, an article by Stefan Gries and Brian Slocum, explains why corpus linguistics represents a radical break from current statutory interpretation practice, and it argues that corpus linguistics ought not be adopted as an interpretive theory for criminal laws. Corpus linguistics has superficial appeal because it promises to increase predictability and to decrease the role of judges’ personal preferences in statutory interpretation. But there are reasons to doubt that corpus linguistics can achieve these goals. More importantly, corpus linguistics sacrifices other, more important values, including notice and accountability.
The Dictionary As A Specialized Corpus, Jennifer L. Mascott
The Dictionary As A Specialized Corpus, Jennifer L. Mascott
BYU Law Review
Scholars consider reliance on dictionary definitions to be the antithesis of objective, big-data analysis of ordinary meaning. This Article contests that notion, arguing that when dictionaries are treated as a specialized database, or corpus, they provide invaluable textured understanding of a term. Words appear in dictionaries both as terms being defined and as terms defining other words. Examination of every reference to a contested term throughout a dictionary’s definitional entries of other words may substantially benefit statutory and constitutional interpretation. Because dictionaries catalog language, their use as a specialized corpus provides invaluable insight into the ways a particular word is …
The Original Meaning Of “Religion” In The First Amendment: A Test Case Of Originalism’S Utilization Of Corpus Linguistics, Lee J. Strang
The Original Meaning Of “Religion” In The First Amendment: A Test Case Of Originalism’S Utilization Of Corpus Linguistics, Lee J. Strang
BYU Law Review
Originalism is the theory of constitutional interpretation that identifies the constitutional text’s public meaning when it was ratified as its authoritative meaning. Corpus linguistics is the study of word-use regularities and patterns, primarily in written texts. In a prior article, I argued that originalists should utilize corpus linguistics to facilitate originalism’s capacity to accurately uncover this original meaning. However, my arguments there were theoretical; this Essay provides a “test case” of corpus linguistics’ capacity to increase originalism’s methodological accuracy. This Essay accomplishes three modest goals. First, it provides a practical example of the application of corpus linguistics to originalism. This …
The Power Of Words: A Comment On Hamann And Vogel’S Evidence-Based Jurisprudence Meets Legal Linguistics—Unlikely Blends Made In Germany, Mark C. Suchman
The Power Of Words: A Comment On Hamann And Vogel’S Evidence-Based Jurisprudence Meets Legal Linguistics—Unlikely Blends Made In Germany, Mark C. Suchman
BYU Law Review
By offering an international and interdisciplinary point of comparison, Hamann and Vogel demonstrate that current American forays into corpus-based legal scholarship reflect only a small sliver of the full range of possibilities for such research. This Comment considers several key branching points that may lie ahead, as the nascent literature begins to mature. In particular, the Comment examines two vexing ambiguities in the corpus-linguistic agenda: the first centers on the ambiguous meaning of legal “empiricism”; the second, on the ambiguous relationship between words and actions. To achieve its full potential, legal corpus linguistics will need to move beyond mere description, …
A Muslim Registry: The Precursor To Internment?, Sahar F. Aziz
A Muslim Registry: The Precursor To Internment?, Sahar F. Aziz
BYU Law Review
Being political scapegoats in the indefinite “war on terror” is the new normal for Muslims in America. With each federal election cycle or terrorist attack in a Western country comes a spike in islamophobia. Candidates peddle tropes of Muslims as terrorists in campaign materials and political speeches to solicit votes. Government officials call for bold measures—extreme vetting, categorical bans, and mass deportations—to regulate and exclude Muslim bodies from U.S. soil. The racial subtext is that Muslims in the United States are outsiders who do not belong to the political community. A case in point is the “Muslim ban” issued by …
#Ordinarymeaning: Using Twitter As A Corpus In Statutory Analysis, Lauren Simpson
#Ordinarymeaning: Using Twitter As A Corpus In Statutory Analysis, Lauren Simpson
BYU Law Review
No abstract provided.
The Courts And Foreign Affairs At The Founding, Kevin Arlyck
The Courts And Foreign Affairs At The Founding, Kevin Arlyck
BYU Law Review
No abstract provided.