Category Archives: Judges and justices

Interpretive communities and car carry

Posted on March 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

(This post takes off from the post about Stephen Mouritsen’s article, so read that one first.)

Having complied with the suggestion above, you will recall that Judge Frank Easterbook—one of textualism’s leading theoreticians—said this:

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Posted in "carry", Corpus linguistics & lexicography, Easterbrook, Interpretive community, Law and linguistics, Muscarello v. United States, Words & phrases

March is becoming National Corpus-Analysis-in-Law Month

Posted on March 5, 2011 | Leave a comment

Coming soon in the Brigham Young University Law Review: “The Dictionary Is Not a Fortress: Definitional Fallacies and a Corpus-Based Approach to Plain Meaning,” by Stephen Mouritsen.

Mouritsen, who is currently clerking on the Utah Supreme Court, has an MA in linguistics from BYU, with an emphasis on corpus linguistics. He studied under Mark Davies, who compiled the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Corpus of Historical English. The appearance of his article at a time when blogospheric attention is being paid to the legal uses of corpus analysis (e.g., on at The Atlantic and on Language Log) is a nice bit of serendipity.

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Posted in Breyer, Cases, Corpus linguistics & lexicography, Dictionaries, Easterbrook, Ginsburg, Judges and justices, Law and corpus linguistics, Law and linguistics, Law review articles, Muscarello v. United States

FCC v. AT&T: A dissenting opinion

Posted on March 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

From Professor Bainbridge:

Twelve pages of what purports to be legal and grammatical analysis follows. But Chief Justice Roberts could have summed up his opinion far more succinctly: “Because at least 5 of us say so.”

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Posted in FCC v. AT&T, Roberts, Statutory interpretation

Decision in FCC v. AT&T

Posted on March 1, 2011 | 3 comments

The Supreme Court has decided FCC v. AT&T, the most recent case in which I filed an amicus brief, which I wrote about here. The issue in the case is whether corporations are protected by the “personal privacy” exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act, and the Court unanimously ruled that (as my brief had argued) they are not. The decision is available here.

In my unbiased opinion, the opinion was influenced by the brief in several respects.

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Posted in "personal", Corpus linguistics & lexicography, FCC v. AT&T, Law, Law and corpus linguistics, Law and linguistics, Roberts, Self-promotion, Statutory interpretation, Words & phrases

Personal privacy ≠ corporate privacy

Posted on January 19, 2011 | Leave a comment

I didn’t intend for the first substantive post here to be devoted to shameless self-promotion, but it’s not every day that a Supreme Court justice gives you a shout-out during an oral argument.

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Posted in "personal", Corpus linguistics & lexicography, FCC v. AT&T, Ginsburg, Law, Law and corpus linguistics, Law and linguistics, Roberts, Self-promotion, Statutory interpretation, Words & phrases