Summarized below are two recent pieces of scholarship that seek to shed light on the original meaning of the Second Amendment using different methods—foreign-language translations of the Bill of Rights from the Founding Era, and corpus linguistics analysis of grammatically-similar phrases—and reaching opposite conclusions. Brandon Kinney, A Well-Outfitted Militia: German–American Translations of the Second […]
As we wrap up the year, below is our list of top 15 most read blog posts during 2021. Remarkably, every one of the top 10 posts was authored by a different contributor, including one from Center faculty affiliate Jeff Swanson, two from Center research assistants, one from the Center’s research affiliate Kat Albrecht, and […]
In the past few weeks, there’s been a few new pieces of interesting firearms law scholarship out. One focuses on the challenge to Heller from the corpus linguistics data unavailable at the time of the decision. The other argues that the historical record supports New York’s law under review in Bruen. James C. Phillips & […]
Over the past decade, research into the ordinary meaning of constitutional terms has been supplemented by corpus linguistics. There is obvious value in examining large databases of historical texts to determine how a particular group of people used a particular word or phrase at a particular time. The text of the Second Amendment protects the […]
I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in this conference on the topic of corpus linguistics and the Second Amendment. However, the timing is a bit unfortunate as my co-author (Josh Blackman) and I are not quite ready yet to make public our findings (hopefully this fall). And we have learned that making findings […]
The Second Amendment is not sloppy or ungrammatical, as some modern analysts claim. Rather, the Amendment is written in a variety of English that no longer exists. Since none of us are native speakers of late 18th century American English, we cannot expect to have good intuitions about its grammaticality or interpretation. When we read […]
Introductory note: In advance of the colloquium on corpus linguistics and the Second Amendment, all the participants submitted drafts of their blog posts, which were in turn distributed to the other participants. Those drafts raised a host of interesting issues—too many to be adequately addressed in the time allotted for the colloquium. I therefore prepared […]
Conservative jurists claim to focus on the text and nothing but the text as they seek to discover the original public meaning of the Second Amendment. But it’s not clear that the amendment ever had a single shared meaning, or if it did, whether that meaning is recoverable. That’s true of any text, not just […]
District of Columbia v. Heller, meet legal corpus linguistics. Opponents of the decision are excited to have a new lever that might dislodge it. Proponents of the methodology are excited to have a great victory to prove their methodology’s worth. But in my view most of this excitement is premature. Falsifying judicial decisions Legal corpus […]
Corpus linguistics has always been concerned with studying language by gathering evidence of language use. Historical corpus linguistics concerns itself with studying the language of some speech community at a specific point in the past (sometimes called synchronic analysis) or studying language change through time (sometimes called diachronic analysis). One reason to gather evidence of […]
Functional linguistics, including corpus linguistic methods, has a lot to offer the study of legal meanings. (For those new to corpus linguistics, I provide a quick introduction, with a few key examples of some really cool findings, in Part I of this paper.) In this post I’ll outline a couple of key insights legal thinkers […]
Textualism is more popular than ever. Not “popular” in the sense of being liked or approved; modern commentators lambast textualism as flawed and even “bogus.” Textualism is “popular” in the sense of focusing on the public. Judges increasingly commit to interpret statutory and constitutional language empirically, in line with its “ordinary” and “public” meaning. To […]
A few weeks ago, the Center hosted a virtual colloquium on Corpus Linguistics and the Second Amendment with experts who are at the forefront of the study of corpus linguistics and its application to a variety of legal questions. Approaching the issue from a broad range of interests, expertise, and backgrounds, these experts raised a […]
