MetroLex: Corpus Linguistics and Constitutional Law Roundtable

The Dictionary Society of North America has partnered with local organizations in the New York City area to establish a series of meetups called MetroLex, bringing together lexicographers, linguists, technologists, educators, and other language professionals to share research and projects relating to dictionary technology, dictionary use, language documentation, semantic ontologies, and lexicography.

We are pleased to feature a roundtable of five speakers on the topic of Corpus Linguistics and Constitutional Law. Lawrence Solan of Brooklyn Law School and Rebecca Shapiro of CUNY-New York City College of Technology will speak on current cases involving the emoluments clause. Neal Goldfarb of the Georgetown University Law Center and Shlomo Klapper of Yale Law School will speak on corpus-based approaches to the Second Amendment. Edward Finegan of the University of Southern California will discuss the role of dictionaries in constitutional law cases.

Lawrence Solan is the Don Forchelli Professor of law and Director of the Center for the Study of Law, Language and Cognition at Brooklyn Law School. Recent work has focused on corpus linguistics and statutory interpretation.

Rebecca Shapiro is an associate professor at CUNY-New York City College of Technology. She will explain how a chance encounter with a lawsuit over the emoluments clause in the Constitution encouraged her to explore other primary documents from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not only did she find that there was more than one or two definitions to emolument but she found that there were several related senses that expanded the understanding. But most important, she found that emoluments were an important part of the English and colonial slave trade.

Neal Goldfarb is a Dean's Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center. His work focuses on using insights from linguistics and lexic0graphy in legal analysis. He will discuss his recent corpus-based reexamination of the phrase keep and bear arms in the Second Amendment, which concludes that the Supreme Court was wrong in its interpretation of the phrase.

Shlomo Klapper is a second-year J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. He will discuss that, because of a solution to the “blue pitta problem,” Justice Scalia was correct in interpreting "bear arms."

Edward Finegan is Professor of Linguistics and Law, Emeritus, at the University of Southern California. Besides a focus on discourse analysis and the discourses of law, his research addresses language variation and English usage, including their treatment in dictionaries.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Law, Language and Cognition and the Dictionary Society of North America

The Dictionary Society of North America was formed in 1975 to bring together people interested in dictionary making, study, collection, and use. Our more than 400 members who live in 40 countries around the world include people working on dictionaries, academics who engage in research and writing about dictionaries, dictionary collectors, librarians, booksellers, translators, linguists, publishers, writers, collectors, journalists, and people with an avocational interest in dictionaries.