Kevin Tobia

Professor Jonathan Choi’s Measuring Clarity in Legal Text adds to a growing literature in empirical legal interpretation, which uses corpus linguistics and survey-experiments to inform legal interpretation. Measuring Clarity offers two intriguing theses, one positive and one critical. On the “positive” reading, the article defends its word embedding approach as a useful method of first-order legal interpretation. On a “critical” reading, the article employs word embeddings as a new tool to assess textualism’s fundamental linguistic assumptions, concluding that there is a fundamental problem with textualism, or at least its current practice.

This Article elaborates on and defends experimental jurisprudence. Experimental jurisprudence, appropriately understood, is not only consistent with traditional jurisprudence; it is an essential branch of it.

Ten years ago, Stephen C. Mouritsen published a student note outlining the possibility of a new legal interpretation tool: corpus linguistics.