A Statistical Test for Legal Interpretation: Theory and Applications

46 Pages Posted: 4 Feb 2021

See all articles by Julian Nyarko

Julian Nyarko

Stanford Law School

Sarath Sanga

Yale University - Law School

Date Written: November 25, 2020

Abstract

Many questions of legal interpretation hinge on whether two groups of people assign different meanings to the same word. For example: Do 18th- and 21st-century English speakers assign the same meaning to commerce? Do judges and laypersons agree on what makes conduct reasonable? We propose a new statistical test to answer such questions. In three applications, we use our test to (1) quantify differences in the meanings of specialized words from civil procedure, (2) identify statistically significant differences between judges and laypersons' understandings of reasonable and consent, and (3) assess differences across various effort standards in commercial contracts (phrases like best effort and good faith effort). Our approach may be readily applied outside the law to quantify semantic disagreements between or within groups.

Keywords: legal interpretation, natural language processing, word embedding models, plain meaning, contracts, reasonable, efforts, consent

JEL Classification: K00, K10

Suggested Citation

Nyarko, Julian and Sanga, Sarath, A Statistical Test for Legal Interpretation: Theory and Applications (November 25, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3737292 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3737292

Julian Nyarko (Contact Author)

Stanford Law School ( email )

559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305
United States

Sarath Sanga

Yale University - Law School ( email )

P.O. Box 208215
New Haven, CT 06520-8215
United States

HOME PAGE: http://https://law.yale.edu/sarath-sanga

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