Week 7: Meeting With NAU Applied Linguistics Professor
Dain Y -
Hello and welcome back to my blog! 🙂
This week I had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Jesse Egbert, an Applied Linguistics Professor at NAU.
Some background on Dr. Egbert is that his focus in linguistics is corpus linguistics. (For those that are unaware of the term, corpus linguistics is the analysis of naturally occurring language or the systematic collection of naturally occurring texts.) And along with teaching courses on corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, computer programming, and statistical methods, Dr. Egbert is also a co-founder and shareholder of the firm Corpus Juris Advisors, and therefore, he ties both worlds of law and linguistics together.
Transitioning back to my meeting with Dr. Egbert, I got to hear about a current project/research Dr. Egbert is doing for something called the ordinary meaning cannon, in which he is doing in collaboration with a Utah legal firm.
The ordinary meaning cannon is best explained by a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Larry Solum’s quote, “Some laws are meant for all citizens and some are meant only for specialists. A text that means one thing in a legal context, might mean something else if it were in a technical manual or a novel.”
What this quote is referring to is that for ambiguous legislatures or legal terms, the judge often reads a statute to avoid ambiguity. However, sometimes, the legal definitions fail to give a good definition or there is no definition entirely, as the law dictionary was not created with the same purpose of a regular dictionary: to thoroughly define a word. There are even cases where there are multiple definitions for a legal term, but sometimes one definition can be beneficial for the defense, and another for prosecution, so it is ultimately the judge’s duty to decide which “definition” to apply to the case.
And it is exactly this issue of wondering what corpus linguistic evidence / “right definition” from the dictionary to use, that had influenced Dr. Egbert’s ongoing solution for this problem.
Using what is called an amicus brief, Dr. Egbert has previously aided courts in order to use linguistic analysis of words as an aiding piece of expertise called corpus linguistic evidence. (An amicus brief is a text that is sufficiently authoritative to be admissible as evidence; though, it is important to note that it is submitted in support of neither party and is meant to be a transparent method.)
Additionally, Dr. Egbert sometimes has preliminary meetings with attorneys in which his team views the case for a few hours, proposes ways that corpus linguistic evidence can be used, and discuss whether or not the attorney’s would like to use the evidence.
It all seems like a seemingly easy addition to add, right?
But then a major question arises: how or when can we apply such amicus briefs or corpus linguistic evidence? As deciding on legal definitions and the ordinary meaning cannon is the responsibility of the judge; however, it may be difficult for them to adopt this method and knowledge as it requires it’s own separate trainings and years of expertise.
And it is this question that is still being looked into by corpus linguists today.
Next was a discussion on the the issue of jury instructions.
When the jury is read jury instructions, the process can take a while, and to some, it may seem like words and information are going through one ear and out the other, even more so if they do not have a written copy to follow along to. (I can attest to this as well having sat through an opening trial, haha.)
So then the question is how much does the jury understand during this process, and are there any terms that they do not fully comprehend?
Though a simple slip up of a few words does not seem like a major issue at a glance, a jury’s understanding of how to apply the law and their instructions can drastically effect how they decide on their outcome for the case.
An example Dr. Egbert used was by taking the term “beyond a reasonable doubt.” For people familiar in the legal field, this may seem like a given term. Although individuals in the legal field may not have an exact percentage of certainty for it, they have a general understanding of what this means or looks like. However, a normal citizen may think that beyond a reasonable doubt has to be 99.99999% certainty.
This led to Dr. Egbert, the Utah Court’s Jury Instruction Revisers, as well as a couple other specialist professors to think of and work to implement solutions such as adding additional language to clarify the meaning, after the legal phrase or term is spoken on the jury instructions.
Reflection
Although I am not sure I can do anything to research this issue myself such as taking part of ongoing studies, I believe they are all very prevalent issues, and hope to look into more previous court cases or research on these problems in the future.
Thank you!
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