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.
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...
Explained in
- Contract Disputes and Statutory Interpretation: The Linguist as ExpertA US constitutional and statutory interpretation theory associated with scholars including Antonin Scalia, Randy Barnett, and Jack Balkin, holding that courts...