Mouritsen’s Landmark Note of Law and Corpus Linguistics

A 2005 law review article by Lawrence Solan noted in passing that corpus linguistics had potential for its application to interpreting legal texts. 38 Loyola of L.A. Law Review 2027 (2005). But the first systematic exploration and advocacy of applying the tools and methodologies of corpus linguistics to legal interpretive questions of law and corpus linguistics came in the fall of 2010, when the BYU Law Review published a note by Stephen Mouritsen, entitled The Dictionary is Not a Fortress: Definitional Fallacies and a Corpus-Based Approach to Plain Meaning. 2010 Brigham Young University Law Review 1915. The note argued that dictionaries are the primary linguistic tool used by judges to determine the plain or ordinary meaning of words and phrases, and highlighted the deficiencies of such an approach. In its stead, the note proposed using corpus linguistics. Here’s the abstract for Mouritsen’s Dictionary is Not a Fortress: Definitional Fallacies and a Corpus-Based…

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