CuRIAM: Corpus re Interpretation and Metalanguage in U.S. Supreme Court Opinions

05/24/2023

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by   Michael Kranzlein, et al.

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Most judicial decisions involve the interpretation of legal texts; as such, judicial opinion requires the use of language as a medium to comment on or draw attention to other language. Language used this way is called metalanguage. We develop an annotation schema for categorizing types of legal metalanguage and apply our schema to a set of U.S. Supreme Court opinions, yielding a corpus totaling 59k tokens. We remark on several patterns observed in the kinds of metalanguage used by the justices.