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The State of Utah, Petitioner /Cross-Respondent, v. Thomas Randall Ainsworth, Respondent/Cross-Petitioner. Respondent/Cross-Petitioner Is Incarcerated.
Get PDFThis writ of certiorari arises from a court of appeals\u27 decision reversing a judgment of conviction arising from a Sery plea to three counts of Driving with a Measurable Controlled Substance in the Body and Causing Serious Bodily Injury or Death, a second degree felony, in violation of Utah Code §58-37-8(2)(g) and (2)(h)(i) (2012), the Honorable Deno G. Himonas, Judge, Third District Court, Salt Lake County, State of Utah, presiding
Session 3
No full textPresentationComment Hanjo Hamann Mark Suchman Brian Slocum and Stefan Thomas Gries Carissa Hessick Stephen Mouritse
Clark Memorandum: Fall 2017
Get PDFClark Memorandum: Fall 2017 Ascending the Mountain: A Story of the People of the Great Hill Unlocking Potential: How a Law Degree Amplifies Your Ability to Bless the World The EU Apple Case: Who Has a Dog in the Fight?https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/clarkmemo_gallery/1059/thumbnail.jp
Advancing Law and Corpus Linguistics: Importing Principles and Practices from Survey and Content Analysis Methodologies to Improve Corpus Design and Analysis
Get PDFThe nascent field of law and corpus linguistics has much to offer legal interpretation. But to do so, it must more fully incorporate principles from survey and content-analysis methodologies used in the social sciences. Importing such will provide greater rigor, transparency, reproducibility, and accuracy in the important quest to determine the meaning of the law. This Article highlights some of those principles to provide a best- practices guide to those seeking to perform law and corpus linguistic analysis
The Dictionary as a Specialized Corpus
Get PDFScholars consider reliance on dictionary definitions to be the antithesis of objective, big-data analysis of ordinary meaning. This Article contests that notion, arguing that when dictionaries are treated as a specialized database, or corpus, they provide invaluable textured understanding of a term. Words appear in dictionaries both as terms being defined and as terms defining other words. Examination of every reference to a contested term throughout a dictionary’s definitional entries of other words may substantially benefit statutory and constitutional interpretation. Because dictionaries catalog language, their use as a specialized corpus provides invaluable insight into the ways a particular word is used in relation to terms throughout the English language. Such evidence provides a crucial interpretive launchpad, even for corpus-based researchers looking for a collection of possible word meanings to analyze in a database of ordinary-language documents
Corpus Linguistics as a Tool in Legal Interpretation
Get PDFIn this paper, we set out to explore conditions in which the use of large linguistic corpora can be optimally employed by judges and others tasked with construing authoritative legal documents. Linguistic corpora, sometimes containing billions of words, are a source of information about the distribution of language usage. Thus, corpora and the tools for using them are most likely to assist in addressing legal issues when the law considers the distribution of language usage to be legally relevant. As Thomas R. Lee and Stephen C. Mouritsen have so ably demonstrated in earlier work, corpus analysis is especially helpful when the legal standard for construction is the ordinary meaning of the document’s terms. We argue here that four issues should be addressed before determining that corpus analysis is likely to be maximally convincing. First, the legal issue before the court must be about the distribution of linguistic facts. Second, the court must decide what makes an interpretation “ordinary.” Third, if one wishes to search a corpus to glean the ordinary meaning of a term, one must decide in advance what to search. Fourth, there are different reasons as to why a particular meaning might present a weak showing in a corpus search, and these need to be understood. Each of these issues is described and discussed
What Happens in Delaware Need Not Stay in Delaware: How Trulia Can Strengthen Private Enforcement of the Federal Securities Laws
Get PDFClass-action lawsuits have been used by private plaintiffs to enforce the federal securities laws since those laws were enacted in the 1930s. With the SEC retaining concurrent authority to enforce federal securities laws, a debate has emerged as to whether the private right of action helps or hinders public enforcement. The primary criticism of private securities litigation is that rent-seeking attorneys abuse the system by bringing frivolous litigation aimed at achieving a settlement and a fee. In the public merger context, the potentially disastrous consequences of failing to close an announced deal on time make corporations eager to settle potentially troublesome litigation. The government responded to the overabundance of securities lawsuits in the 1990s by tightening the reigns on class-action securities litigation, making what was once low-hanging fruit for plaintiffs’ attorneys more difficult to grasp. At the same time, there was a marked uptick in the number of class-action corporate lawsuits brought in state courts, in particular, in Delaware. These suits claim breach of fiduciary duty on the grounds that securities filings accompanying public merger announcements provided shareholders with insufficient or inadequate information. This Comment claims that the wave of merger objection class-action suits arising in the mid-2000s should be properly viewed as federal securities law claims masquerading as corporate law claims, thus avoiding the heightened securities class-action requirements of the 1990s. In a recent case from the Delaware Court of Chancery, In re Trulia, Inc. Shareholder Litigation, Chancellor Bouchard established a new “plainly material” standard for approving class-action settlements where deficient federal securities filings are at issue. Because Trulia is properly viewed as a state court’s response to deficient enforcement of the federal securities laws, it has the potential to serve as a bellwether for the state of health of private enforcement of the federal securities laws