Category Archives: Interpretation
‘On the Perils of Using Corpus Linguistics to Interpret Statutes’
Anya Bernstein, ‘Legal Corpus Linguistics and the Half-Empirical Attitude’, 106 Cornell Law Review 1397 (2021). In ‘Legal Corpus Linguistics and the Half-Empirical Attitude’, Professor Anya Bernstein provides an illuminating and forceful critique of the claim that corpus linguistics – the study of patterns of language usage across a wide array of English-language sources – should […]
Shlomo Klapper, ‘Section 230 Textualism’
ABSTRACT The debate over Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act – the most important law governing the internet – rages on. Yet this debate has been conducted largely without the input of a textualist method of statutory interpretation, as judges have employed purposivism to apply the statute broadly while scholars and critics have relied […]
Tobia, Slocum and Nourse, ‘Ordinary Meaning and Ordinary People’
ABSTRACT Perhaps the most fundamental principle of legal interpretation is the presumption that terms should be given their ‘ordinary’ (ie, general, non-technical) meanings. This principle is a central tenet of modern textualism. Textualists believe a universal presumption of ordinary meaning follows from their theory’s core commitment: A law should be interpreted consistently with what its […]
‘Copyright (Rights and Remuneration of Musicians, Etc) Bill debated in UK Parliament’
“As previously discussed, the Copyright (Rights and Remuneration of Musicians, Etc) Bill proposed new laws for equitable remuneration for streaming, contract adjustment, right of revocation and transparency. The Bill was debated in the UK Parliament on Friday 3rd December. Here’s what happened [aside from a whole load of completely unnecessary and tedious oversharing from several […]
Ryan Doerfler, ‘Late-Stage Textualism’
ABSTRACT In its modern form, textualism promised careful attention to interpretive context. Such attention would allow textualism to be less ‘wooden’ than its earlier manifestations and so to avoid the embarrassing ‘contradictions’ of the sort highlighted by Karl Llewellyn’s table of ‘dueling’ interpretive canons. Avoiding that sort of embarrassment, though, required that textualists be more […]
Asif Hameed, ‘Modern Textualism and the Challenge of Conflicting Statutes’
ABSTRACT How should judges interpret statutes? Sophisticated arguments and expansive programmes have been developed in modern textualist writing with the aim of guiding judges on the practical queries and challenges that they face. One issue has however received reduced treatment: how textualist-minded judges should address conflicts between rules derived from different statutes. We discuss how […]
Anya Bernstein, ‘Legal Corpus Linguistics and the Half-Empirical Attitude’
ABSTRACT 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 […]
Jeffrey Goldsworthy, ‘The Meaning and Interpretation of Statutes in Anglo-American Legal Systems’
ABSTRACT This book chapter provides an overview of the meaning and interpretation of statutes in Anglo-American legal systems. It first explains how statute law is based on the constitutional doctrine of legislative supremacy, in the UK, the US and elsewhere. It then shows that statutory meaning is largely, but not entirely, constituted by the meaning […]
Data-Driven Approaches to Legal Interpretation: special number of the Brooklyn Law Review
Mechanical Turk Jurisprudence (Shlomo Klapper) Corpus Linguistics and the Law: Extending the Field from a Statistical Perspective (Stefan Th Gries) Big Data and Accuracy in Statutory Interpretation (Brian G Slocum) Adding Context and Constraint to Corpus Linguistics (Jeffrey W Stempel) What Counts as Data? (Anya Bernstein) Two Types of Empirical Textualism (Kevin Tobia and John […]
David Louk, ‘The Audiences of Statutes’
ABSTRACT Although a maxim of statutory drafting is to identify the relevant audience and draft so that the audience can ‘get the message’, conventional theories of statutory interpretation often overlook important considerations about how statutes communicate and delegate to a diverse range of intended audiences. Statutes exist to change the conduct and behavior of many […]