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THE MEANING OF THE THREE EMOLUMENTS CLAUSES IN THE U.S. CONSTITUTION: A CORPUS LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF AMERICAN ENGLISH FROM 1760–1799 JAMES CLEITH PHILLIPS & SARA WHITE† “All our work . . . is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material of which laws are made . . . Everything depends on our understanding of them.” –Justice Felix Frankfurter1 I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................... 182 II. BACKGROUND ................................................................................ 184 A. The Emoluments Clause and Current Litigation .................... 184 B. Semantics and Constitutional Interpretation .......................... 186 C. Problems with Law-Office Linguistics .................................... 187 D. Scholarship on the Meaning of “Emolument(s)” ................... 192 III. CORPUS LINGUISTICS ..................................................................... 197 A. The Purpose of Corpus Linguistics ......................................... 197 B. Corpora................................................................................... 198 C. Tools of Corpus Linguistics .................................................... 199 IV. DATA AND METHODOLOGY ........................................................... 202 A. This Article’s Three Corpora .................................................. 203 B. Coding Methodology............................................................... 205 V. RESULTS ......................................................................................... 208 A. Frequency ............................................................................... 208 B. Collocates ............................................................................... 209
†James Phillips is a PhD candidate in Jurisprudence & Social Policy at UC-Berkeley, from which he also has a J.D., and an association in the constitutional law section of Kirton McConkie. Sara White has an M.A. in linguistics from Brigham Young University and is currently the J. Reuben Clark Law School’s inaugural Corpus Linguistic Research Fellow. The authors thank the South Texas Law Review staff for the invitation to participate in the 24th Annual Ethics Symposium, as well as the symposium’s participants, Nicholas Rosenkranz, and Kevin Quinn for their helpful comments. 1. Garson Kanin, Conversations with Felix, READER’S DIGEST, June 1964, at 116, 117 (reply to counsel who said a question from the bench was just a matter of semantics).
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