Originalism and the Invisible Constitution
77
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.”
32
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.
78
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.
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