CuRIAM: Corpus re Interpretation and Metalanguage in U.S. Supreme Court
  Opinions
Michael Kranzlein Nathan Schneider Kevin Tobia
Most judicial decisions involve the interpretation of legal texts; as such,
judicial opinion requires the use of language as a medium to comment on or draw
attention to other language. Language used this way is called metalanguage. We
develop an annotation schema for categorizing types of legal metalanguage and
apply our schema to a set of U.S. Supreme Court opinions, yielding a corpus
totaling 59k tokens. We remark on several patterns observed in the kinds of
metalanguage used by the justices.