Question

Over the past decade, a novel methodological approach known as corpus linguistics has increasingly infiltrated constitutional jurisprudence. Borrowed from computational linguistics, this method involves analyzing massive, digitized databases—or corpora—of historical texts to determine the empirical frequency and typical contexts of specific words at the time a constitution was drafted. For proponents of originalism, who argue that constitutional text must be interpreted according to its original public meaning, corpus linguistics promises a long-sought prize: scientific objectivity. By replacing a judge’s subjective historical intuition with quantifiable data about how words like "commerce" or "searches" were actually deployed in eighteenth-century discourse, advocates contend that constitutional interpretation can finally be tethered to empirical reality rather than judicial preference. They argue this method effectively mitigates the ideological biases that often plague constitutional law.

However, a growing chorus of legal historians and jurisprudential skeptics has warned against treating corpus linguistics as an interpretive panacea. These critics point out that historical corpora are inextricably skewed toward elite, literate, and published voices—such as politicians, merchants, and newspaper editors—effectively silencing the vernacular of the marginalized populations of the era. Furthermore, they argue that linguistic meaning is fundamentally pragmatic and context-dependent; treating words as isolated data points to be algorithmically counted strips them of the rhetorical, political, and historical nuances inherent in the act of constitution-making. To these skeptics, corpus linguistics merely drapes the inherently subjective enterprise of historical interpretation in the intimidating, yet fundamentally hollow, garb of mathematical certainty, creating a veneer of scientific rigor that obscures deep methodological flaws.

The skeptics are undoubtedly correct to highlight the methodological blind spots of historical corpora, and their warnings provide a necessary corrective to the most grandiose claims of the method’s early adopters. It is undeniably true that counting word frequencies in surviving political pamphlets cannot, by itself, resolve profound constitutional ambiguities or account for the unrecorded linguistic conventions of marginalized groups. Yet, to dismiss corpus linguistics entirely on these grounds, as some prominent historians urge, is premature. While it cannot supply an objective algorithmic formula for constitutional meaning, corpus linguistics remains a highly valuable diagnostic instrument. When deployed judiciously alongside traditional historical analysis, it can effectively expose the anachronistic assumptions of modern judges and map the outer boundaries of plausible historical meaning. Acknowledging that a tool is imperfect should not preclude its use, especially when the prevailing alternative—judges relying on rudimentary historical dictionaries and their own unverified linguistic intuitions—is arguably far more susceptible to the very subjective biases the critics seek to avoid.

The author's attitude toward the use of corpus linguistics in constitutional jurisprudence can best be described as which one of the following?