Over about the past year, there’s been a significant increase in the attention being paid to the idea of using corpus linguistics in legal interpretation. One of the most recent developments has occurred in a case that will be argued next week in the Supreme Court, in which two of the amicus briefs rely on corpus linguistics (Brief of Scholars of Corpus Linguistics; Brief of Prof. Jennifer L. Mascott).
The case in question is Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission, and it raises the question whether federal Administrative Law Judges are “officers of the United States” within the meaning of the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. This is the first of what will be two or three posts that are prompted by the filing of these briefs. However, none of the posts will deal with the substance of the legal or linguistic issues in the case.
Lucia is the first Supreme Court case I’m aware of in which anyone has relied on corpus analysis since FCC v. AT&T, Inc., in which I filed an amicus brief that was largely corpus-based. It’s also as far as I know the only case in any court where corpus analysis has been used in a brief in connection with an issue of constitutional interpretation.