I recently came across a new paper by Stephen Mouritsen: “Corpus Linguistics in Legal Interpretation—An Evolving Interpretive Framework” (pdf). Judging from the title, you might think that the paper is intended as an introduction to corpus linguistics as an interpretive tool, with the intended audience being lawyers, judges, and law professors. But if you thought that, you’d be wrong.
The paper traces the birth and development (so far) of law-and-corpus-linguistics as a field of practice and study. (Hmmm…“field of practice and study”? Doesn’t that sound a little overblown?) Because the paper was written for an audience that was already familiar with corpus linguistics, it doesn’t explain what corpus linguistics is. What it does instead is to give a fairly complete description of the work that has been done so far in this area of inquiry. (No, that’s worse.) It covers what’s happened in the courts, in the legal academy, and in the internet-o-sphere. And with more attention starting to be paid law-and-corpus-linguistics movement (oy), there has been a need for something that will help them get up to speed. This paper fills that need.