Kevin Tobia

Online
Response
Algorithmic Interpretation
Kevin Tobia
Associate Professor, Georgetown University Law Center.

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.

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Article
Volume 89.3
Experimental Jurisprudence
Kevin Tobia

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.

Online
Essay
The Corpus and the Courts
Kevin Tobia
Assistant Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center.

He thanks the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review for excellent editorial assistance.

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