New Originalism
Definition
A US constitutional and statutory interpretation theory associated with scholars including Antonin Scalia, Randy Barnett, and Jack Balkin, holding that courts should apply the original public meaning of a constitutional or statutory provision as it was understood at the time of enactment. Corpus linguistics is proposed as the empirical tool for establishing that historical meaning.
- Field
- US constitutional and statutory interpretation theory
- Key figures
- Antonin Scalia, Randy Barnett, Jack Balkin
- Interpretive target
- Original public meaning at time of enactment
- Forensic linguistics link
- Corpus linguistics used to test claimed original meaning
Common questions
How does a linguist actually apply corpus methods to this theory?+
The linguist searches large text corpora from the era of enactment for how a disputed word or phrase was used, then reports frequency and context patterns to the court as evidence of the ordinary public understanding at that time, rather than offering a personal opinion on meaning.
Does New Originalism differ from older forms of originalism?+
Yes. Earlier originalism often asked what the drafters subjectively intended. New Originalism instead asks what an ordinary reader or listener at the time would have understood the words to mean, which is why an empirical, corpus-based approach fits it more naturally.
Is corpus linguistics evidence always accepted by courts under this framework?+
No. Courts vary in how much weight they give corpus findings, and opposing experts often dispute corpus composition, search methodology, or whether frequency data settles a genuinely contested legal question.
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 Jurisprudence
- The practice of using corpus analysis as evidence in statutory or constitutional interpretation. Associated in the US with Brigham Young University's Law...
- Corpus Linguistics
- The study of language through large, principled collections of texts or transcripts. In forensic work, corpus methods are used to count how...
- 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...