WE HOLD THESE LINGUISTIC TRUTHS TO BE LEGALLY RELEVANT

On October 5th, alum Jason Merchant delivered a University of Chicago Harper Lecture for UChicago friends and alumni in New York City. Jason spoke about his interdisciplinary project “Historical Semantics and Legal Interpretation” with UChicago law professor Alison LaCroix. Their aim is to enrich contemporary textual analysis in law with insights from theoretical linguistic analysis and large-scale historical corpus analysis, to precisely investigate the syntactic and semantic distributions of important legal terms throughout history in order to understand the use of such terms both at a law’s enactment and as language changed.