Introducing the International Law Highlighter
Jenny Kemp, Stephen Riley and Thuy Thai
The International Law Highlighteris an online tool designed to help LLM students. It was funded by an ALT small grant in 2025 and is open access.
The aim of the project was to create, introduce and evaluate a tool to help LLM students from non-UK and/or non-law backgrounds, who can be disadvantaged in terms of academic literacy for law, particularly reading. Essentially the tool highlights ‘law words’ in any text pasted into the analysis box. It can be used to raise learner awareness of words which often have a law-specific meaning and/or usage. The tool enables students to independently identify and prioritise unfamiliar words. Language and skills teachers can also use the tool for materials and lesson development.
The highlighted words are based on extensive research into the language of private and public international law carried out by Jenny Kemp. She built a digital corpus of LLM texts from 12 legal domains (e.g. Company Law and IHRL), based on reading lists from UK universities. The texts cover the full range of genres read by students, from textbooks and journal articles to law reports and treaties.
From this corpus, a list of 1000 statistically pervasive ‘law’ words was extracted. These words are widely used across the 12 domains, and are more common in law texts than academic texts generally. On average, they comprise 25% of the word count of a typical LLM text. Law teachers consider the majority of list words to be law words and to typify legal genres; yet they would only gloss or explain a few of the words. Students would be expected to know them, or to acquire their legal meanings and usage alone or with the help of language and skills teachers.
Initial feedback on use of the tool showed that students find the tool useful and easy to use. However, more guidance is needed to enable students to see how they can use the tool to see legal phraseology, particularly where apparently ‘everyday’ words are being used in a law-specific way. These resources are being planned, and a link will be provided here when they are ready.
In the meantime, the tool can be found here: https://law-highlighter.online and the following video introduces teachers to the tool’s features:
Citing the tool:
Kemp, J. (2025) International Law Highlighter. [Web application]. https://law-highlighter.online
