Formal and Computational Linguistic Perspectives on Legal Interpretation (NASSLLI 2025 course)
Instructors: Brandon Waldon, Nathan Schneider
Held: June 23–27, 2025, 5:00–6:20pm daily
Location: University of Washington campus, Seattle and Zoom
Homepage: https://github.com/bwaldon/nasslli-law
This course offers a critical perspective on legal interpretation through the lenses of formal and computational linguistics. It begins with an overview of contemporary philosophical debates in statutory interpretation. Textualism, the dominant interpretive doctrine in U.S. jurisprudence, prioritizes a text's ‘ordinary meaning’, often relying on tools such as dictionaries and the so-called canons of construction (Scalia & Garner, 2012). We will examine how these methods are deployed in practice, identifying their limitations in capturing the complexities of linguistic interpretation. Building on a tradition of scholarship at the intersection of linguistics and law (Solan, 1993; Cunningham et al., 1993; inter alia), we will then explore how formal linguistic theory addresses challenges that arise in the textualist approach. By examining past U.S. court cases, we will discuss how principles from syntax, semantics, and pragmatics can provide more rigorous and scientifically-informed guidance in hard cases of legal interpretation.
This course will also highlight the potential of computational linguistics to augment legal text analysis through data-driven approaches to the study of legal interpretation. Students will learn how tools such as automated syntactic parsing can complement insights from linguistic theory. We will also critically assess the growing role of LLMs in legal interpretation.
Prerequisites: Students should have some familiarity with formal semantics/pragmatics and basic syntax. Students are not expected to have any programming experience.