textualism_tool_plain

Determine if a paragraph from a judicial opinion is applying a form textualism that relies on the ordinary (“plain”) meaning of terms.

Source: Austin Peters

Size (samples): 169

Legal reasoning type: Rhetorical-analysis

Task type: Binary classification

Task description

This is a binary classification task in which the LLM must determine if a paragraph interpreting a statute uses the plain or ordinary meaning of the statutory text. In order to recieve a positive label (``Yes’’), the paragraph must:

Reference reliance on the use of plain meaning in interpreting the statute. This includes explicit reference or referencing the tools logic.
Provide evidence that the opinion used a plain meaning approach. This includes a) citing it as a general rule of decision guiding the outcome or b) applying it to the facts.

Task construction

The contributes collected a sample of 1,000 random Court of Appeals paragraphs where a verb + noun combination occurs in a sentence suggests the paragraph involves statutory interpretation. For example, the combination of “interpret” + “statute”. These paragraphs where then manually coded as to whether they meet the criteria above.