Category Archives: Lee

Responding further to Hessick on corpus linguistics (The first in a series)

Carissa Hessick has recently posted a near-final version of her forthcoming article Corpus Linguistics and the Criminal Law, which will appear in  a special issue of the B.Y.U. Law Review devoted to the papers that were presented at the law-and-corpus-linguistics conference at Brigham Young about a year ago. Like the draft that Hessick posted in September, the new version argues against the use of corpus linguistics in statutory interpretation. And although the article deals specifically with the use of corpus linguistics in criminal cases, Hessick acknowledges that some of her criticisms may apply more broadly.

I blogged about the previous draft, outlining some of my disagreements with Hessick’s position, and also offered some comments in response to her trio of posts about corpus linguistics at PrawfsBlawg (link, link, link). My disagreements apply equally to the revised version.

In this post, I’ll have some further things to say about Hessick’s portrayal of corpus linguistics as “a radical break from current interpretive theories.” The targets of that claim are Stephen Mouritsen and Utah Supreme Court Justice Lee. But as I’ll discuss, Mouritsen disputes Hessick’s reading of both his individual work and the work he and Lee have done together. (Justice Lee has so far maintained radio silence; perhaps he and Mouritsen will respond to Hessick in their forthcoming article in the Yale Law Journal [draft].) And in two or three posts that will follow this one, I’ll address some of the other aspects of Hessick’s argument. (Part 2 is here.)

HESSICK’S THESIS HASN’T CHANGED SIGNIFICANTLY between her original draft and the revised version. So the new draft, like the previous one, paints what I believe is an inaccurate picture of how corpus linguistics relates to statutory interpretation, and of the views and goals of corpus linguistics’s proponents.

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Corpus linguistics coming to the Sixth Circuit bench? (Plus LAWnCorpusLing roundup)

Adam Liptak reports in the New York Times that President Trump will announce a number of nominations to the lower federal courts, and that one of them is Justice Joan L. Larsen of the Michigan Supreme Court, who will be nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

That caught my eye, because in June 2016, the Michigan Supreme Court became the first state supreme court in the country to expressly approve the use of corpus linguistics in statutory interpretation. Continue reading