Research Tools: BYU Law Adds Full Congressional Record to its Law and Corpus Linguistics Corpora

From a BYU Law News Release:

BYU Law today announced the addition of the Congressional Record Corpus to its Law and Corpus Linguistics suite of corpora. A pioneering technology tool for the legal community, the Law and Corpus Linguistics Technology Platform enables users to analyze large collections of historical texts called “corpora” for better understanding of context and meaning of words. Although the Congressional Record has been publicly available in a digital format for years, searchability has been limited as most of the record has only been available in a PDF format. Users will now be able to search the full record through BYU’s Law and Corpus Linguistics interface, which allows for users to complete a variety of complex searches.

The Congressional Record Corpus (CRC) contains the entirety of the Congressional Record as published from 1873-2021 by the Government Publishing Office. The Congressional Record is a detailed record of legislative history, including bills introduced, transcripts of floor debate and remarks, conference and committee reports, statements by legislators and other proceedings. In total, the CRC contains 4.6 billion words and over 6,000 texts, including data on year and session of Congress.

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BYU Law is a pioneer in the discipline of law and corpus linguistics as the first law school in the United States to offer a course on the topic, the first to host an annual corpus linguistics conference, and the first to develop a dedicated Law and Corpus Linguistics Technology Platform. In 2020, BYU Law released the public version of its law and corpus linguistics platform and search interface, which included the Corpus of Founding Era Ame to Corican English, the Corpus of Early Modern English, and the Corpus of Supreme Court Opinions of the United States. Available at lawcorpus.byu.edu, the database has been used by thousands of researchers, including federal and state justices, and appellate attorneys.

Learn More, Direct to Complete News Release

Direct to Law & Corpus Linguistics Projects Page–BYU Law

Direct to Congressional Record Corpus

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