BYU Law Announces Constitution Day Release of Corpus of Founding-Era Ratification Documents

New searchable collection adds more than 7 million words from 14,000 texts, and significantly expands one of the nation's leading law and corpus linguistics platforms

PROVO, Utah, Sept. 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Timed just ahead of Constitution Day, and as the nation continues reflecting on the 250th anniversary of American independence, BYU Law today announced the addition of a new searchable corpus drawn from selected eighteenth-century texts in The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (DHRC), the landmark collection produced by the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Center for the Study of the American Constitution at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A corpus is a large collection of texts that can be analyzed to understand the ordinary meaning of words at the time they were written. Home to one of the nation's leading law and corpus linguistics programs, BYU Law has helped pioneer the use of corpus linguistics as a tool for understanding legal meaning, including of the US Constitution.

The new DHRC corpus will be available through BYU Law's Law and Corpus Linguistics (LCL) platform (lawcorpus.byu.edu), both as a standalone resource and as an expansion of the Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA). Containing nearly seven million words from more than 14,000 primary-source texts documenting the debates surrounding the Constitution's ratification, the new corpus expands COFEA by approximately 20% to significantly broaden the founding-era materials available for research.

"These additions help researchers better understand the language and arguments that shaped the Constitution's adoption," said David Armond, assistant dean for IT at BYU Law. "By making these sources searchable and accessible, we're providing scholars, attorneys and judges with a richer picture of how constitutional language was used and understood during one of the most important periods in American history."

The DHRC offers a far more comprehensive record of the ratification period than sources previously available through the platform. While COFEA has long included Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, commonly known as Elliot's Debates, the new DHRC corpus contains more than 17 times the amount of primary-source text, adds new authors and perspectives, and substantially increases the newspaper content available for analysis. The additions broaden the range of voices represented in the corpus, enabling researchers to study not only prominent founders such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, but also thousands of newspaper editors, pamphleteers, political advocates and other participants whose arguments helped shape public opinion during ratification.

The new corpus incorporates selected primary-source materials from the DHRC and links entries directly to the University of Wisconsin Libraries' hosted version of the complete collection, allowing researchers to move seamlessly between corpus analysis and original source documents.

As artificial intelligence increasingly shapes legal research and analysis, corpus linguistics remains one of the few methods that allows researchers to examine underlying evidence, replicate searches and verify results. That transparency has made corpus-based analysis an important tool in ongoing debates over constitutional interpretation, statutory meaning and the role of AI in the legal profession.

The corpus linguistics project also demonstrates the intersection of historical scholarship and emerging technology. BYU Law student researchers identified and extracted ratification-era primary-source materials, while AI-assisted tools helped identify potential transcription and digitization anomalies for review, helping preserve the quality and integrity of the corpus.

About the Law and Corpus Linguistics Platform

Since launching its corpus linguistics platform in 2016, BYU Law has developed resources and methodologies discussed, applied and critiqued by judges, attorneys, scholars and students across the legal profession. Corpus linguistic methods have also been used in state and federal court cases, including United States v. Escobar-Temal, in which Sixth Circuit Judge Amul Thapar relied on data from BYU Law's COFEA to analyze 18th-century usage patterns in a constitutional interpretation dispute.

In addition to the new DHRC corpus, BYU Law continues to expand resources available through its LCL platform, including updates to the Congressional Record corpus through the end of 2025.

About BYU Law

Founded in 1971 with its inaugural class in 1973, the J. Reuben Clark Law School (BYU Law) has become one of the nation's leading law schools, recognized for innovative research and teaching in  transactional design, entrepreneurship, corpus linguistics, criminal justice and religious freedom. The Law School has more than 7,000 alumni serving in communities around the world. BYU Law is consistently ranked by National Jurist as one of the best-value law schools in the country. BYU Law has also been recognized as a top law school by the Bloomberg Law School Innovation Program for doing cutting-edge work with tomorrow's lawyers. As a faith-based school, BYU Law seeks to "develop people of integrity who combine faith and intellect in lifelong service to God and neighbor." For more information, visit law.byu.edu.

SOURCE BYU Law