The Antiregulatory Arsenal, Antidemocratic Can(n)ons, and the Waters Wars

The Clean Water Act (CWA) has become a centerpiece in an enduring multifront battle against both environmental regulation and federal regulatory power in all of its settings. This article focuses on the emergence, elements, and linked uses of an antiregulatory arsenal now central to battles over what are federally protected “waters of the United States.” This is the key jurisdictional hook for CWA jurisdiction, and hence, logically, has become the heart of CWA contestation. The multi-decade battle over Waters protections has both drawn on emergent antiregulatory moves and generated new weapons in this increasingly prevalent and powerful antiregulatory arsenal. This array of antiregulatory skews and frames can be decisive, especially when wielded before sympathetic judges skeptical about the administrative state or environmental protection. The article questions the legitimacy of this antiregulatory arsenal, points out ways these antiregulatory moves in the Waters setting often dodge actual statutory choices, and identifies countervailing strategies that are more respectful of democratic choices. The new antiregulatory canons are akin to weaponized cannons empowering judges. The article calls for judges to apply more legislatively respectful frames in exploring questions of legal meaning, statutes’ policy priorities, or regulatory power as allocated by Congress and wielded by agencies based on scientific or factual criteria prioritized in governing statutes

The European Commission's public consultation on the review of EU copyright rules: a response by the CREATe Centre

No abstract available

The CRIKE Data-Science Process for Legal Knowledge Extraction

In this paper, we present CRIKE, a data-science approach to automatically detect concrete applications of legal abstract terms in case-law decisions. To this purpose, CRIKE relies on the use of the LATO ontology where legal abstract terms are properly formalized as concepts and relations among concepts. Using LATO, CRIKE aims at discovering how and where legal abstract terms are applied by judges in their legal argumentation. Moreover, we detect the terminology used in the text of case-law decisions to characterize concrete abstract-term instances

Emotion in Politics in Times of War: A Corpus Pragmatics Study

[EN] Emotions remain a fertile field of research. Thanks to newly available technology, investigating people's preferences, emotions and feelings is relevant for different purposes and perspectives. Consequently, the exploration of emotion has stimulated specialised software development. This paper presents a snapshot of currently available computational tools for analysing emotions. We also explore and compare their contributions and use them complementarily to characterise a corpus. The study presented here combines several emotion analysis tools to examine and characterise a corpus of political debates. Specifically, 34 British House of Commons debates on the war in Ukraine have been examined to identify the lexicon associated with the emotions articulated by parliamentarians in a situation of maximum political conflict, such as war, and to provide a global overview of the most common terms used, to express emotion and feeling. Using corpus pragmatics, a comprehensive overview of the corpus is obtained, as it allows the analysis of considerable amounts of data, studied from a pragmatics perspective, for the characterisation of emotion in terms of meaning and use.Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-Universitat Politecnica de Valencia agreement with Springer Nature. No research grants were obtained from funding agencies or research support (including salaries, equipment, supplies, reimbursement for attending symposia, and other expenses) by organizations that may gain or lose financially through publication of this manuscript.Mestre-Mestre, EM. (2023). Emotion in Politics in Times of War: A Corpus Pragmatics Study. Corpus pragmatics (Online). 7(4):323-344. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-023-00147-w3233447

The European Commission's public consultation on the review of EU copyright rules: a response by the CREATe Centre

No abstract available