Date: May 5, 2026 (Tuesday)
Time: 6pm – 7pm
Venue: Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Piotr Bystranowski (Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland)
This project uses computational methods to trace the rise and conceptual structure of “new textualism” in U.S. federal caselaw. Drawing on a large corpus of judicial opinions, it combines word embeddings and transformer-based models to analyze how terms such as “text,” “plain meaning,” and “public meaning” evolve over time and across interpretive contexts. The findings show that “text” has emerged as a distinct technical concept in legal reasoning, with multiple clustered uses and shifting semantic associations. By introducing measures of interpretive “prescience,” the project also identifies where innovations in textualist reasoning originate within the judicial hierarchy.
Piotr Bystranowski is a legal philosopher and Assistant Professor at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics at Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Poland). He specializes in the application of empirical and computational methods in law and philosophy and has published both theoretical and empirical work on the theory of criminalization, legal interpretation, and legal reasoning. He currently leads a four-year project, Ignorance of Law: A Study in Experimental Jurisprudence.
Moderator: Benjamin Chen, Associate Professor & Director of the Law and Technology Centre, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=106115.
For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at / 3917 4727.