Ep 079: Exploring the Meaning of Legal Terms through Corpus Linguistics

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At</span> <a href= "https://law.byu.edu/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">BYU Law</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">in Provo, Utah, a first-of-its-kind technology platform is enabling legal researchers to explore the meanings of legal words and phrases by examining the contexts in which they historically were used. The</span> <a href= "https://lcl.byu.edu/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Law and Corpus Linguistics</span></a> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">platform enables users to examine large collections of historical texts to help determine, for example, what early drafters meant by a phrase such as “bear arms.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In this episode of LawNext, my guest is</span> <a href= "https://law.byu.edu/faculty/david-l-armond/"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">David Armond</span></a><span style= "font-weight: 400;">, head of infrastructure and technology and senior law librarian at BYU Law, who was instrumental in helping create and launch the platform. We discuss this emerging field of corpus linguistics and how it is being used by lawyers, judges and legal scholars. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The BYU Law collection is now home to seven collections of historical text, or corpora, including founding-era American English (1760-1799), early modern English (1475-1800), Supreme Court opinions, U.S. caselaw, records of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and more. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As it happened, host Bob Ambrogi interviewed Armond live at BYU Law on the very day that the school decided to close down due to the coronavirus crisis. Before discussing their scheduled topic of corpus linguistics, Armond and Ambrogi had a conversation about how a law school prepares to shut down and go online. That conversation was posted as</span> <a href= "https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2020/03/lawnext-episode-66-how-one-law-school-prepared-for-coronavirus-shutdown.html"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">LawN