What the app asks

The central question is whether Religion Clause argument has become more originalist, historical, textual, or tradition-oriented over time. In plainer terms: when lawyers and Justices argue about religious liberty and establishment of religion, do they increasingly rely on the Constitution's original meaning, founding-era history, historical practice, text, and determinate legal materials?

Why this matters

Originalism is often discussed through opinions, theory, and high-profile cases. Oral argument offers a different kind of evidence. It shows constitutional reasoning while it is being tested in real time: which authorities advocates invoke, which ideas Justices press, and which forms of argument seem available or persuasive at different moments. A corpus approach cannot replace legal judgment, but it can make patterns visible that would be hard to see by memory or impression alone.

What is being counted

The app does not directly measure abstract ideas such as "originalism" or "policy reasoning." Instead, it counts concrete words and phrases associated with different forms of legal argument. For example, historical and originalist vocabulary includes terms such as original meaning, founding, Framers, ratification, First Congress, history and tradition, Madison, and Jefferson. Doctrinal vocabulary includes terms such as Lemon, endorsement, coercion, neutrality, substantial burden, strict scrutiny, and generally applicable.

How the vocabularies relate to each other

The vocabularies are best understood as overlapping lenses, not sealed compartments. A single case can use historical vocabulary, doctrinal vocabulary, precedent vocabulary, and liberty vocabulary at the same time. That is expected: constitutional argument often combines several kinds of reasoning in one exchange.

The headline comparison groups the vocabularies into two broad families. The first family captures originalist, historical, textual, and determinate legal-materials language. The second family captures other forms of legal and moral reasoning, including doctrine, precedent, institutional concerns, administrability, liberty, and policy language. This comparison is meant to show whether originalism-related language is becoming more prominent relative to the rest of the argumentative field.

The individual dictionaries then let the reader look underneath that headline comparison. For example, if the originalism-related line rises, the app can help ask whether the increase is driven mainly by historical terms, textual terms, founding-era references, or broader language about determinate legal materials. If the comparison line rises, the app can help ask whether that movement comes from doctrine, precedent, administrability, liberty, or moral/policy vocabulary.

How to read the charts

The main chart compares originalism-related vocabulary with other legal and moral-reasoning vocabulary over time. Rates are reported per 10,000 words, so a long argument is not automatically treated as more important than a short one. Case-level charts identify arguments that are especially worth close reading. The trend charts show broad movement over years or decades. Co-occurrence shows which kinds of vocabulary tend to appear in the same case.

Why close reading is still necessary

A word count is only a starting point. Some terms are noisy. "Tradition" might refer to constitutional tradition, religious tradition, or the procedural history of a case. "History" might refer to founding-era evidence or simply to litigation history. For that reason, the KWIC page shows each matched term in context. The app is designed to point the reader toward important examples, not to draw final legal conclusions by itself.

What the pilot can produce

The pilot can produce a defined Religion Clause corpus, case-level charts, preliminary trend evidence, examples for close reading, and exportable summaries. Those outputs can support a larger project on originalism and constitutional argument across multiple areas of constitutional law.

Dictionary Details

The dictionaries below show the terms currently used to represent each form of argument. They should be treated as transparent seed lists, open to refinement as the corpus is reviewed.