Phoenix68
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2022
- Messages
- 17,276
"During Koch-funded trips to mountain resorts, Trump judges huddled over a new strategy to advance “history and tradition” as the law of the land.
Before they could roam the slopes, they would spend the morning learning about a tool that could supposedly revolutionize how judges interpret the law. It was called corpus linguistics, and it was simple on its face. A corpus essentially works like a search engine that returns every example of how a word or phrase was used in a select database of historical texts.
But the leading proponents of legal corpus linguistics see it as something more: a powerful new tool to shore up the legitimacy of the conservative legal movement. Now, judges claiming to be interpreting the Constitution as it was originally understood could wield the imprimatur of big data.
Few have failed to notice how perfectly “history,” in these judges’ rendering, aligns with current Republican beliefs on issues like guns and abortion. Corpus linguistics offers one way to dodge these criticisms. A judge who could keyword-search millions of lines of historical text, the thinking goes, is a judge who could ward off accusations that his version of history was invented for a partisan outcome.
The Institute’s chair, James Heilpern, is a graduate of Brigham Young University’s * J. Reuben Clark Law School, the intellectual birthplace of legal corpus linguistics and where he first became enthralled with its potential. “It’s not every day that something really new comes along that has the opportunity to transform the legal profession,” he has said."
Before they could roam the slopes, they would spend the morning learning about a tool that could supposedly revolutionize how judges interpret the law. It was called corpus linguistics, and it was simple on its face. A corpus essentially works like a search engine that returns every example of how a word or phrase was used in a select database of historical texts.
But the leading proponents of legal corpus linguistics see it as something more: a powerful new tool to shore up the legitimacy of the conservative legal movement. Now, judges claiming to be interpreting the Constitution as it was originally understood could wield the imprimatur of big data.
Few have failed to notice how perfectly “history,” in these judges’ rendering, aligns with current Republican beliefs on issues like guns and abortion. Corpus linguistics offers one way to dodge these criticisms. A judge who could keyword-search millions of lines of historical text, the thinking goes, is a judge who could ward off accusations that his version of history was invented for a partisan outcome.
The Institute’s chair, James Heilpern, is a graduate of Brigham Young University’s * J. Reuben Clark Law School, the intellectual birthplace of legal corpus linguistics and where he first became enthralled with its potential. “It’s not every day that something really new comes along that has the opportunity to transform the legal profession,” he has said."
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* Admission to the BYU Law School is open to people of any faith or sexual orientation, subject to the school's Honor Code. Among other things, the Honor Code precludes the admission and retention of students who are former members of the LDS Church, or whose actions are categorized as "homosexual behavior", which includes both sexual relations and "all forms of physical intimacy that give expression to homosexual feelings". To verify Honor Code compliance, students are required to obtain, and maintain during their course of study, an ecclesiastical endorsement from a religious leader or designated BYU chaplain. In 2016, the ABA, which accredits the school, conducted a review to determine whether BYU Law School's admission and retention policy was in accordance with its nondiscrimination policy. The ABA ended the review later in 2016 after BYU modified the Honor Code to make it easier for students to obtain an exemption to the ecclesiastical endorsement requirement.".
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