The runaway success of conservatives’ decadeslong campaign to dominate the federal courts is not without its challenges. With a 6-3 stranglehold on the Supreme Court and Trump judges dominating federal appeals courts, the right wing has increasingly pushed the legal view that the law must be interpreted based on “history and tradition.” Yet few have failed to notice how perfectly “history,” in these judges’ rendering, aligns with current Republican beliefs on issues like guns and abortion. Corpus linguistics offers one way to dodge these criticisms. A judge who could keyword-search millions of lines of historical text, the thinking goes, is a judge who could ward off accusations that his version of history was invented for a partisan outcome.

The huddle in at the ski resort was part of a well-funded effort to spread corpus linguistics even further. A new nonprofit called the Judicial Education Institute had picked up the tab. Since its incorporation in 2020, the Judicial Education Institute has raised roughly $1 million from Charles Koch’s network and Donors Trust, an anonymous rightwing funding network dubbed “the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement.”