“… This essay explores textualism’s newest tool: corpus linguistics. Over the past five years, the tool has been increasingly employed by US courts. Legal corpus linguistics has also caught the attention of the US Supreme Court. Justice Thomas mentioned corpus linguistics in his 2018 Carpenter dissent, and Justice Alito noted it again in his 2021 Duguid concurrence. Most recently, Justices Roberts and Barrett discussed corpus linguistics in a 2022 oral argument. Broadly speaking, legal corpus linguistics treats collections of texts (‘corpora’) as data. To learn about the ordinary meaning of a statutory or constitutional term (eg ‘commerce’), a textualist would evaluate how that term is commonly used in different written sources (eg books) and what other words tend to appear near it in those sources …”
Kevin Tobia, Dueling Dictionaries and Clashing Corpora, 71 Duke Law Journal Online 146-158 (2022).
First posted 2022-06-25 09:15:18
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