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... On Oct. 13, 2022, a handful of the country's most conservative federal judges gathered inside a wine cellar at a luxury ski resort in Deer Valley, Utah. The surrounding mountains were ablaze with yellow aspens, and the speaker addressing the room joked that the judges were already planning their afternoon hikes.
Before they could roam the slopes, they would spend the morning learning about a tool that could supposedly revolutionize how judges interpret the law. It was called corpus linguistics, and it was simple on its face. A corpus essentially works like a search engine that returns every example of how a word or phrase was used in a select database of historical texts.
But the leading proponents of legal corpus linguistics see it as something more: a powerful new tool to shore up the legitimacy of the conservative legal movement. Now, judges claiming to be interpreting the Constitution as it was originally understood could wield the imprimatur of big data.
"In the beginning, we only had paper, hard copies. Remember those things called books?" the speaker, Josh Blackman, a prolific legal scholars on the right, said to the judges assembled in the wine cellar. "Computer technologies open an entire new world of research."
The runaway success of conservatives' decadeslong campaign to dominate the federal courts is not without its challenges. ...
Already, corpus linguistics has made cameos in some of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' opinions and played a role in striking down the Biden administration's public transportation mask mandate.
The huddle in at the ski resort was part of a well-funded effort to spread corpus linguistics even further. A new nonprofit called the Judicial Education Institute had picked up the tab.
Since its incorporation in 2020, the Judicial Education Institute has raised roughly $1 million from Charles Koch's network and Donors Trust, an anonymous rightwing funding network dubbed "the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement." ...
