Inside The Ritzy Retreats Hosting Right-Wing Judges

During Koch-funded trips to mountain resorts, Trump judges huddled over a new strategy to advance “history and tradition” as the law of the land.

On Oct. 13, 2022, a handful of the country’s most conservative federal judges gathered inside a wine cellar at a luxury ski resort in Deer Valley, Utah. The surrounding mountains were ablaze with yellow aspens, and the speaker addressing the room joked that the judges were already planning their afternoon hikes.

Before they could roam the slopes, they would spend the morning learning about a tool that could supposedly revolutionize how judges interpret the law. It was called corpus linguistics, and it was simple on its face. A corpus essentially works like a search engine that returns every example of how a word or phrase was used in a select database of historical texts.

But the leading proponents of legal corpus linguistics see it as something more: a powerful new tool to shore up the legitimacy of the conservative legal movement. Now, judges claiming to be interpreting the Constitution as it was originally understood could wield the imprimatur of big data.

“In the beginning, we only had paper, hard copies. Remember those things called books?” the speaker, Josh Blackman, a prolific legal scholars on the right, said to the judges assembled in the wine cellar. “Computer technologies open an entire new world of research.”

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.