Court Opinion | Margda Pierre-Noel v. Bridges Public Charter School

MARGDA PIERRE-NOEL v. BRIDGES PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL

No. 1:23-cv-00070 (TNM).

United States District Court, District of Columbia.

April 6, 2023.

Available here

Pierre-Noel, under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”), seeks for accommodations to be made for her disabled son to be ensured transportation to school. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) is used to determine the meaning of “transportation” within the context of the provision’s creation. It is noted that “Although dictionaries, regulations, and other statutes provide a useful starting point,” words must be seen in context, and corpus linguistics is just the tool for that.

Court Opinion | Taylor v. Nicholson-Williams, Inc.

Taylor v. Nicholson-Williams, Inc.

368 So. 3d 1007 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2023).

Available here.

Corpus linguistics is noted as  a tool to offer more probative evidence of what statutory language meant to the public at the time of enactment.

Court Opinion | Cargill v. Garland

Cargill v. Garland

57 F.4th 447 (5th Cir. 2023).

Available here.

Cargill, having surrendered several bump stocks to the Government, challenges the legality of that action law under current national regulations. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and News on the Web Corpus (NOW Corpus) are used to analyze “function of the trigger,” and related phrases in order to analyze Cargill’s claims. In response, it is argued that tools like corpora are useless in cases of statutory lexical ambiguity and that, “ambiguous statutes are always grievously ambiguous.”