Neal Goldfarb has an essential and illuminating second post at LAWnLinguistics responding to Clarissa Hessick's paper Corpus Linguistics and the Criminal Law. Here is a taste:
ONE OF THE PREMISES of the usage-based approach to word meaning, in both corpus-based analysis and traditional lexicography, is that the patterns of actual usage constitute the subject of inquiry—the raw data to be analyzed—and that those patterns provide evidence of the various meanings that a word is used to convey. And in fact, actual usage does more than simply provide evidence of a word’s meaning(s), it determines those meanings. To state it differently, word meaning arises from usage.
This point is absolutely crucial to understanding the role of corpus linguistics in determination of the meaning (communicative content) of legal contexts. The post is deeply informed and must reading.