The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective

Originalism and the Invisible Constitution 

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within the family, as in the following hypothetical clause: “Every person has 

a right to personal security, including the right to be free from violence by 

strangers and from domestic violence.” Once again, even a few adjacent words 

are sufficient to resolve the ambiguity.

We can restate this point more formally:

Characteristically, ambiguity in the semantic content of a constitutional text 

is liquidated by context and hence does not appear in the communicative 

content of the text.

Because “interpretation” in the technical sense in which we are using that 

word is just the activity that ascertains the communicative content of a text, it 

follows that ambiguity in semantic content can usually be resolved by inter-

pretation (so long as the interpreter takes context into account).

The qualifying word “characteristically” expresses the notion that there is 

no guarantee that semantic ambiguity can be resolved by context. For exam-

ple, it might be the case that complete information about the publicly availa-

ble context of constitutional communication would resolve the ambiguity, but 

also that the relevant evidence of that context is no longer available because 

of the passage of time. Another possibility is that the text is inherently ambig-

uous; this could occur because the drafters of a legal text were unable to com-

promise on some issue; in this situation, they might choose language that is 

deliberately ambiguous and hence cannot be liquidated by resort to context. 

We can call these special cases “irreducible ambiguity.”

Now consider vagueness and open texture. Recall that if a word is vague, 

the semantic meaning of the word admits of borderline cases. H. L. A. Hart 

expressed a similar idea with his notion of “core” and “penumbra.”

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 In the 

core of settled meaning, the applicability of the rule to a particular case is 

clear. In the penumbra, we have borderline cases – where the application of 

the rule is underdetermined by the legal materials that are its source. Outside 

the penumbra, the rule clearly does not apply. Open texture poses similar but 

more complex problems of application. For example, the word “reasonable” 

(and “unreasonable” which appears in the Fourth Amendment to the United 

States Constitution) may well be a multiple-criteria concept with incommen-

surable dimensions: if so, then the decision whether a particular practice is 

unreasonable may be underdetermined by the concept.

32 

See H. L. A. Hart, “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals” (1958) 71 Harvard Law 

Review 593, 606–15; see also H. L. A. Hart, in Penelope A. Bulloch and Joseph Raz (eds.), The 

Concept of Law, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 125–7.

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Lawrence B. Solum

Of course, we have recognized that there is a distinction between commu-

nicative content and legal content. From the fact that the communicative 

content (linguistic meaning in context) of a constitutional provision is vague 

or open-textured, it does not necessarily follow that the legal content is also 

vague – a vague constitutional provision could have received an authoritative 

construction that resolves the ambiguity.

Vague and open-textured texts characteristically require construction. Of 

course, there are a variety of ways in which construction can liquidate ambi-

guity. Here are a few:

Precisification: Vague provisions can be precisified via rules that draw bright 

lines sorting borderline cases.