Out of Many, One: Discovering the Shared Statutory Speech Community Through Corpus Linguistics

• Published in: Brigham Young University law review Vol. 2018; no. 5; pp. 1119 - 1157
• Main Author: Miller, Justin A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Provo Brigham Young University, Reuben Clark Law School 01.09.2018
• Subjects: Communication; Debates; Dictionaries; Firearms; Fitzgerald, F Scott (1896-1940); Interpreters; Language; Law; Legislatures; Linguistics; Semantics; Speech; State court decisions; United States > US
• ISSN: 0360-151X; 2162-8572

"5 On one extreme of this debate, a minority advocates never consulting legislative history; on the other, another minority advocates always consulting it, even if the text is otherwise plain.6 The vast majority of interpreters, however, fall somewhere between these two extremes. Because most of these interpreters acknowledge that the text is the primary source of law and the clearest indication of legislative intent,7 the debate surrounding statutory interpretation has focused principally on just one of the communicating parties - the public, as measured by ordinary public meaning-to the neglect of the other party-the legislature, as measured by legislative intent.8 But legislative intent can be approximated without focusing on the more controversial aspects of using legislative history. [...]the text's meaning can never be determined if divorced completely from context.63 And one of the most important ways to determine a statute's context is by using legislative history: " [S]tatutes first gain meaning within the context that gave them life: the give and take of the legislative process[, so] we must read [them] within the context of the legislative process, which is reflected in the statute's legislative history. FINDING A UNIFIED CONGRESSIONAL INTENT THROUGH CORPUS LINGUISTICS I believe that many of the concerns with using legislative history to inform context-such as the difficulty of finding the intent of a multimember body or having the record subject to manipulation-can be resolved by looking at legislative history data as a whole instead of referring to isolated data points. [...]the first step for interpreters seeking to resolve the selective use of legislative history is to select and organize the appropriate body of language, or corpus (plural corpora), into a lexical database. Again, corpus linguistics does not resolve questions on the battlefield of interpretive theory, it just clears the fog of war. Since the purpose of the legislation (at least in the mind of one senator) was to "persuade the man who is tempted to commit a federal felony to leave his gun at home,"175 perhaps Congress intended a broader meaning of carry.