Constitutional Law

Interpreting text

People hate lawyers because 99% of them give the rest of us a bad reputation. People hate law profs because some think and speak like this:

"Larry seems to argue that our own normative or empirical notions cannot play a role in fixing the semantic content of constitutional text: In his words, the belief that "semantic content is determined after the fact of communication on the basis of what we would like an utterance to have meant given our practical concerns" is a "fundamentally confused" way to think about interpretation (page 103). Larry includes three pages (pages 146-49) on the principle of charity, Quine, and Davidson in Semantic Originalism, but he treats charity as a way of reducing ambiguity through "construction" rather than as a form of "interpretation."

I think that I disagree with Larry on the role of charity, which I take to be built into interpretation just as deeply as any anthropological examination of dictionaries and rules of grammar."

Full post as published by Of Arms and the Law on January 12, 2010 (boomark / email).