Measuring Clarity in Legal Text
Date: December 2, 2024 (Monday)
Time: 9am – 10am
Venue: Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Jonathan Choi (Professor of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law)
This Article makes both theoretical and empirical contributions to the legal concept of textual clarity. It first advances a theory of clarity that distinguishes between information and determinacy. It then proposes a new method to algorithmically evaluate textual clarity. Applying techniques from natural language processing and artificial intelligence that measure the semantic similarity between words, we can shed valuable new light on questions of legal interpretation.
This Article finds that text is frequently indeterminate in real-world legal cases. Moreover, estimates of similarity vary substantially from corpus to corpus, even for large and reputable corpora. This suggests that word use is highly corpus-specific and that meaning can vary even between general-purpose corpora that theoretically capture ordinary meaning.
These empirical findings have important implications for ongoing doctrinal debates, suggesting that text is less clear and objective than many textualists believe. Ultimately, the Article offers new insights both to theorists considering the role of legal text and to empiricists seeking to understand how text is used in the real world.
Jonathan H. Choi is a professor of law at USC Gould School of Law. He specializes in law and artificial intelligence (applying natural language processing to study legal issues), tax law and statutory interpretation. His work has appeared in the New York University Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, the Yale Journal on Regulation and the Yale Law Journal, among others. His work has been covered by a wide variety of news outlets, including ABC News, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, the Daily Mail, Fox News, NBC Nightly News, the New Yorker, Reuters, the Star Tribune, and the Washington Post.
Choi graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College, with a triple major in computer science, economics and philosophy and earned high honors for his computer science thesis. He earned a JD at the Yale Law School, where he was the executive bluebook editor of the Yale Law Journal and a founding co-director of the Yale Journal on Regulation Online. Before entering academia, he practiced tax law at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York. He previously taught at the University of Minnesota Law School.
Discussant: Benjamin Chen, Associate Professor & Director of Law and Technology Centre, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
This is an in-person event with speaker’s presentation conducted online via Zoom. All HKU students are welcome! Q&A session is prioritized for students in LLAW6313.
To register for the talk, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?UEID=97598 (HKU Portal login is required).