(Mis)judging Ordinary Meaning?: Corpus Linguistics, the Frequency Fallacy, and the Extension-Abstraction Distinction in 'Ordinary Meaning' Textualism
Author | Shlomo Klapper |
Position | J.D. Candidate (2020), Yale Law School |
Pages | 327-369 |
Rarely is a new yardstick of legal meaning created. But over the past decade, corpus
linguistics has begun to be utilized as a new tool to measure ordinary meaning in
statutory interpretation and original public meaning in constitutional interpretation.
The legal application of corpus linguistics posits that an examination of every use
of a term in a wide variety of documents can yield a more complete, impartial
understanding of a word than can dictionaries, intuition, or an unsystematic survey
of sources. Corpora could supplement, or even supplant, dictionaries and native-
speaker intuition in legal analyses. For originalism in particular, legal corpus
of view which, until now, has lacked one.
However, corpus linguistics, as applied to legal problems, falls prey to a fatal
methodological criticism – the frequency fallacy. The criticism states that in a
corpus, an unusual meaning can have many corpus entries while a perfectly ordinary
meaning can be completely absent from the corpus. That is, frequency is not a good
measure of meaning. Since legal corpus linguistics relies on frequency, the corpus
cannot inform legal meaning.
This article parries this otherwise fatal critique. It argues that while the frequency
fallacy is self-evidently true, the fallacy is not inherent to the corpus, but rather is
an artifact of misinterpreting the corpus by treating it like a dictionary. This defense
methods of discerning ordinary meaning: extension and abstraction. As illustrated
by Yates v. United States and United States v. Marshall, extension entails extending
the statutory term to varying facts, while abstraction keeps the facts constant and
properly, one must analyze not only the presence of the legal term in question but also
its absence; that is, one must determine the presence or absence of other terms to
describe a similar factual scenario to distinguish between artifacts of language and
facts about the world.
© 2019 Shlomo Klapper, published by Sciendo.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
8 Br. J. Am. Leg. Studies (2019)
a. The Formalist Turn ......................................................................
..............................................
c. The Age of “Big Data” .................................................................
a. Muscarello v. United States .........................................................
b. “Commerce” .................................................................................
c. State v. Rasabout ...........................................................................
d. People v. Harris ............................................................................
.....................................................
f. “Emoluments” ...............................................................................
g. “Bear Arms” .................................................................................
A. The Implicit Methodology: Common Means Ordinary ................
B. The Current Critique: A Frequentist Methodology Ignores Lurking
Variables ...........................................................................................
Not only does this answer make legal corpus analysis methodologically sound, but
read the law, thus potentially furthering the rule of law.
Corpus Linguistics, Originalism, Statutory Interpretation, Legal Interpretation,
Yates, Marshall, Interpretative Methods
328
C. How the Frequency Fallacy Undermines Corpus Analyses of Legal
Cases .................................................................................................
D. Conclusion: A Challenge to the Corpus Enterprise.....................
A. Two Methods of Discerning Ordinary Meaning: Extension and
Abstraction ........................................................................................
B. The Extension: Abstraction in Practice ........................................
Yates v. United States ........................................................................
United States v. Marshall ..................................................................
C. A New Diagnosis: Applying the Dictionary’s Extensions Method in a
Corpus World ....................................................................................
D. The Solution: Using an Abstractions Approach
in Corpus Analyses ...........................................................................
a. Muscarello v. United States ..........................................................
b. “Commerce” .................................................................................
c. State v. Rasabout ...........................................................................
d. “Bear Arms” .................................................................................
A. How to Use a Corpus: Qualitative, Not Quantitative ..................
B. The Tenacity of Extension .............................................................
329
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