Corpus Jurisprudence
Definition
The practice of using corpus analysis as evidence in statutory or constitutional interpretation. Associated in the US with Brigham Young University's Law and Corpus Linguistics project (Lee and Mouritsen). Several US state supreme courts and circuit courts have adopted corpus evidence in opinions; the US Supreme Court has engaged with it cautiously.
- Also called
- Corpus linguistics in law
- Associated project
- BYU Law and Corpus Linguistics
- Key scholars
- Lee and Mouritsen
- US Supreme Court stance
- Cautious engagement
Common questions
What problem is corpus jurisprudence trying to solve in statutory interpretation?+
Courts often decide the ordinary meaning of a statutory word by intuition or dictionary definition alone; corpus jurisprudence instead measures how the word is actually used across a large body of real texts to ground that meaning in evidence.
Has corpus evidence been accepted uniformly across US courts?+
No. Adoption is uneven: some state supreme courts and circuit courts have relied on corpus data in written opinions, while the US Supreme Court has referenced the approach without fully endorsing it as a standard interpretive method.
Related terms
- Concordance
- A list of all occurrences of a target word in a corpus, shown in their surrounding context (KWIC: keyword in context). Concordance...
- Corpus Linguistics
- The study of language through large, principled collections of texts or transcripts. In forensic work, corpus methods are used to count how...
- New Originalism
- A US constitutional and statutory interpretation theory associated with scholars including Antonin Scalia, Randy Barnett, and Jack Balkin, holding that courts should...
- Ordinary Meaning
- The meaning a reasonable person with ordinary linguistic competence would assign to a word or phrase. It is the default canon of...
- Syntactic Ambiguity
- Ambiguity arising from the grammatical structure of a sentence rather than from any individual word's meaning. The Oxford comma case is a...