Talking across the interdisciplinary aisle: A guide for legal and corpus-linguistic scholars and practitioners

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss a variety of misunderstandings that have arisen – and still linger – in the field of Law and Corpus Linguistics (LCL). Many have to do with the interdisciplinary nature of legal scholarship and practice on the one hand and corpus linguistics (CL) on the other. Our goals are to address these misunderstandings to explicate them, illuminate the assumptions that co-motivated them in the first place, and provide advice as to how to discuss, maybe refute, and avoid them moving forward, especially given the progress made to-date. In order to illustrate our discussion, we have separated the critiques into two major stages in the collaborative process – (i) a legal stage and (ii) a corpus linguistics stage. In stage (i), we address issues such as the desire to involve a corpus linguist, the question of whether the use of CL outsources a judicial task, and the role CL plays in legal theories of interpretation. In stage (ii), we discuss common critiques of CL applications to legal interpretation such as the claim that the method is inherently subjective, the potential arbitrariness of corpus compilation and selection, and the variable role that context plays in such applications. The final section provides our set of recommendations connecting the two stages to allow for the iterative fine-tuning process we think is required for successful collaboration in academic and applied legal settings; we conclude with our view on who should do corpus linguistics in legal contexts, hopefully facilitating further talk across the interdisciplinary aisle.