Our 8th annual conference will be held on October 13, 2023. The keynote address will be delivered by Dean Gordon Smith. We look forward to panels on a wide range of topics.

Please register here.
The schedule is available here.

Pre-conference Workshop

Introduction to Corpus Linguistic Applications to Law

There will be a workshop, titled Introduction to Corpus Linguistic Applications to Law, on Thursday from 9:00 – 12:00 for linguists who are interested in learning more about legal applications of corpus linguistics. The workshop is free of charge. If you are interested, please register HERE. Lunch will be provided immediately following the workshop.

Pre-Conference Gathering Dinner

On Thursday night, Oct. 12, there is a gathering Dinner at Guru’s in Provo, Utah. This is a conversation dinner. We will be reconnecting and meeting our new members. Please note on the registration form if you will attend the pre-conference dinner.

One of our panels will focus on the intersection between intellectual property law and corpus linguistics. The papers for this panel will be published in a symposium issue of the BYU Law Review. For more details, click here.

Proposals are invited for individual papers and panels. We are open to submissions on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:

applications of corpus linguistics to the constitutional, statutory, contract, patent, copyright, trademark, probate, administrative, and criminal law in any state or nation;

philosophical, normative, and pragmatic commentary on the use of corpus linguistics in the law;

triangulation between corpus linguistics and other empirical methods in legal interpretation;

the relationship between corpus linguistics and pragmatics (e.g. implicature, presupposition, sociolinguistic context);

corpus-based analysis of legal discourse or topics;

best practices in corpus design and corpus linguistic methods in legal settings

The Project

BYU Law’s Law & Corpus Linguistics was initially inspired by Stephen C. Mouritsen’s BYU Law Review Note, The Dictionary Is Not a Fortress: Definitional Fallacies and a Corpus-Based Approach to Plain Meaning, (2010). As various scholars began to apply corpus linguistic to legal questions, BYU’s Linguistics Professor Mark Davies’ well known Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) proved invaluable.

Following the development of formal Law & Corpus Linguistics course at the Law School in the Fall of 2013, the BYU Law Library started providing limited support for students in the class and faculty applying corpus linguistics to their scholarship such as Gordon Smith.

Research Platform

James Philips, a visiting assistant professor in Winter of 2015 , envisioned the creation of a simplified research platform and the creation of a Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA). Initial texts were gathered throughout 2015 and 2016 and in the Fall of 2016 the initial design of the Law & Corpus Linguistics Platform commenced.