Test a claim at scale
Ask whether a doctrine, interpretive method, precedent family or phrase changes across cases, courts, time periods or speakers.
Supreme Court Religion Clause oral arguments, 1980-2025
How Originalism Has Changed Supreme Court Religion Clause Argument
Bring a claim about constitutional method to a corpus that can be searched, counted and checked in context. This pilot turns decades of oral argument into evidence a legal scholar can actually read.
Test Claims
See whether legal language rises, falls or travels with other arguments.
Find Examples
Jump from a pattern to the cases and transcript passages behind it.
Stay in Control
Use counts to find leads while preserving close legal judgment.
See the change for yourself
From a hunch to auditable evidence
For legal scholars
What this can do for your research
Find examples without the grind
Replace thousands of manual searches with targeted leads, then read the relevant passages yourself.
Keep judgment in the loop
Revise dictionaries, mark meaningful uses and separate passing references from serious legal argument.
Build around your project
Bring a doctrine, archive, case set or vocabulary. The same system can be shaped around your sources and questions.
Research interface
Oral-Argument Corpus Dashboard
Loading Supreme Court Religion Clause oral-argument transcripts.
Cases...
Transcripts...
Words...
Dictionary hits...
Dashboard filters
At a glance
The headline comparison
Loading corpus trend...
Headline vocabulary comparison chart
Line chart comparing originalist vocabulary with other reasoning vocabulary.
What this view shows
The overview compares originalist, historical and determinate legal-materials vocabulary with other legal and moral-reasoning vocabulary, using rates per 10,000 words.
Why KWIC matters
Word counts point to patterns; KWIC lets a reader confirm whether a hit reflects meaningful legal argument.
Trends
How legal language changes over time
Each line is normalized per 10,000 words.
Cases
Turn patterns into a reading list
Rank cases by the language most relevant to your question.
| Rank | Case | Year | Rate | Hits | Top matched terms |
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KWIC Context
Inspect the argument
Move from a count to the actual language, with enough context for legal judgment.
Loading transcript context...
| Case | Year | Speaker | Role | Term | Context |
|---|
Co-occurrence
Which arguments travel together?
See which vocabularies tend to appear in the same cases under the current filters.
Data/Export
Take the evidence with you
Download focused evidence for notes, articles, books or grant proposals.
| Case | Year | Words | Selected hits | Rate |
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Methods
How the evidence is built
A condensed methods page; the full dictionary details remain below.
In plain English: the app counts defined word lists in Supreme Court Religion Clause
oral-argument transcripts and reports rates per 10,000 words. It provides a basis for further legal
research, removing the tedium of thousands of searches from scholars' plates and enabling them to focus
on analysis.
Corpus Construction
The pilot studies Supreme Court Religion Clause oral arguments from 1980 through 2025. Transcript turns are organized by case, year, speaker, speaker role, Religion Clause type and legal framework so aggregate trends can be checked against case-level examples.
Dictionary Design
The dictionaries capture doctrinal vocabulary, precedent anchors, textual argument, historical/original-public-meaning language, RFRA/RLUIPA terms and other legal-reasoning families. They are transparent seed lists: useful for finding patterns, and open to refinement as the corpus is reviewed.
Reading the Vocabularies
The word lists are overlapping lenses rather than sealed categories. A single exchange can invoke doctrine, precedent, text, history, liberty and administrability at once, which is why the app pairs headline trends with dictionary-level views.
Normalization & Scaling
Counts are scaled as hits per 10,000 transcript words. This keeps long arguments from overwhelming short arguments simply because they contain more words.
Interpretation Caveats
A dictionary hit may be meaningful, quoted, rejected or incidental. KWIC review supplies the close reading because terms such as history, tradition or neutrality can carry different legal meanings in different transcript turns.
What the Pilot Produces
The pilot produces case-level summaries, normalized trend evidence, co-occurrence leads and examples for close reading. Those outputs can support a larger project on originalism and constitutional argument across additional sources and constitutional domains.
Dictionary Details
Why it matters
Legal argument leaves a trail
If constitutional method changes, that shift should leave traces in how advocates and justices talk about text, history, tradition, precedent and institutional consequences.
The point is not to replace legal judgment with word counts. It is to make a claim testable, then bring the language back into view for close reading.
Trend, ranking and KWIC context together give scholars a faster way to find examples, challenge impressions and develop better questions.
Scope and method
A compact methods note
The dashboard Methods tab keeps the dictionaries and caveats visible, so a reader can see how the evidence was built before deciding what it means.
How it works
The pilot counts defined word lists in Religion Clause oral-argument transcript turns, normalizes rates per 10,000 words, and keeps transcript context available for validation.
The same architecture can be tailored for other constitutional domains, briefs, opinions, archives or scholar-defined vocabularies.
Build your corpus
Bring a legal question. Leave with a research instrument.
This Religion Clause pilot is a starting point. Bring a doctrine, case set, archive, time period or vocabulary, and I can shape a searchable, auditable tool around the question you actually want to answer.
- Custom dictionaries for doctrines, cases, phrases, interpretive methods or institutions.
- Human review workflows that distinguish meaningful uses from passing references.
- Exportable evidence for articles, books, briefs, presentations or grant proposals.