Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Technologies Of Language Meet Ideologies Of Law, Anya Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

This Article challenges this new prevailing wisdom, puts legal corpus linguistics in the context of other meaning-making technologies, and suggests an approach for analyzing any technology of language in the law. One of my aims is to caution against technological exceptionalism—a view that computerized, automated, or big-data approaches are somehow special, perhaps more trustworthy, less subjective, and most likely to succeed. Rather, I argue that we should ask the same questions and make the same demands of any method of interpretation.

Any technology, after all, is only as useful as the way it is used: Technology depends on technique. So …