Abstract
Judges and legal scholars have recently been beguiled by a new method of legal interpretation: legal corpus linguistics. Using large data sets of actual language use promises to give some empirical grounding to claims about how “ordinary people” would use or understand legal terminology—claims that pervade legal interpretation. Unlike corpus linguistics in the field of linguistics, however, legal corpus linguistic analysis tends not to articulate or examine the precise contours of what its data sets can reveal. Practitioners are thus liable to make large claims on the basis of information that doesn’t support them. This essay undertakes a more careful parsing of what the corpora preferred by legal corpus linguistics can, and cannot, reveal. Although I conclude that legal corpus linguistics currently faces a mismatch between information and aspiration, I also suggest areas of legal work where it can be of real use.
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