Cornell Law Review

Article

Legal Corpus Linguistics and the Half-Empirical Attitude

Anya Bernstein, Professor of Law, SUNY Buffalo Law School

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 that…

Nov 2021