I developed the Legal Academic Word List (LAW List for short) in 2006 to determine what vocabulary international students would be expected to be familiar with when they begin their studies, typically as LL.M students, at U.S. law schools. To discover those expectations, 1.1 million words were processed, more than 75% from the 'casebooks' used in required first-year law school courses.
What I found from that corpus was that, even if new international law students were conversant in the General Service List (roughly the 2000 most common word families in English text) and the Academic Word List (excluding the GSL, the most common word families in college-level academic text), they still would be knowledgeable in only about 90% (GSL+AWL+ProperNouns = 90.75% of legal academic words) of the vocabulary they would find in standard 1L texts.
Reading scholars state that readers need to know 95% or more of the words in a text for “reasonably successful guessing of the meaning of unknown words.” (Liu & Nation, 1985) Since 345 LAW List words made up 5.5% of the 1.1 million words in my legal academic corpus, learning them might be an efficient way to overcome an important obstacle to legal academic reading comprehension.
To process the words, I used the RANGE software developed by Paul Nation (also available here). The software made it relatively easy to insert text into RANGE and then find all words that were neither proper nouns nor GSL/AWL. The most frequent of those word families would make up LAW List.
The ten most common word families are displayed below, along with their overall frequency and their frequencies in different doctrinal sub-sets. The complete LAW List is stored in a Dropbox excel file.
What I found from that corpus was that, even if new international law students were conversant in the General Service List (roughly the 2000 most common word families in English text) and the Academic Word List (excluding the GSL, the most common word families in college-level academic text), they still would be knowledgeable in only about 90% (GSL+AWL+ProperNouns = 90.75% of legal academic words) of the vocabulary they would find in standard 1L texts.
Reading scholars state that readers need to know 95% or more of the words in a text for “reasonably successful guessing of the meaning of unknown words.” (Liu & Nation, 1985) Since 345 LAW List words made up 5.5% of the 1.1 million words in my legal academic corpus, learning them might be an efficient way to overcome an important obstacle to legal academic reading comprehension.
To process the words, I used the RANGE software developed by Paul Nation (also available here). The software made it relatively easy to insert text into RANGE and then find all words that were neither proper nouns nor GSL/AWL. The most frequent of those word families would make up LAW List.
The ten most common word families are displayed below, along with their overall frequency and their frequencies in different doctrinal sub-sets. The complete LAW List is stored in a Dropbox excel file.
