I have creaed a downloadable version of my series of posts replying to Stephen Griffin's helpful and illuminating comments on Semantic Originalism. This downloadable version adds a Reader's Guide with a short summary of the argument of Semantic Originalism to the nine part series of replies. The download adds light footnoting and citations as well. Here is the link:
A Reader's Guide to Semantic Originalism and a Reply to Professor Griffin
And if you prefer the online versions, here are the links:
Reply to Griffin, Part One: Background, Context, and Constitutional Holism--the clause meaning thesis is not "clause bound interpretivism," the meaning of each clause is determined by the publicly available context, including the meaning of the whole Constitution.
Reply to Griffin, Part Two: Constitutional Amendments--Determination of the relationship of constitutional amendments to the main text and to each other may involve constitutional implicature or harmonizing constructions.
Reply to Griffin, Part Three: Going Beyond the Text--Likewise, general constitutional principles like "separation of powers" may be intermediate steps in the construction of vague provisions, such as "executive power," "legislative power," and so forth.
Reply to Griffin, Part Four: Constitutional Disagreement--There can be disagreement about the semantic content of the Constitution, including the question whether a particular provision is vague, but such disagreements can usually be resolved by the linguistic facts.
Reply to Griffin, Part Five: Concepts and Kinds--This post addresses the concept-conception distinction invoked by Ronald Dworkin, and the notion of a natural kind associated with Saul Kripke.
Reply to Griffin, Part Six: Interpretive Pluralism --This post distinguishes several different ideas that might be called "interpretive pluralism" and demonstrates the plausible versions are consistent with the claims of "Semantic Originalism."
Reply to Griffin, Part Seven: The Relationship of the Constituitonal Text and Constitutional Law--The contribution thesis claims that conventional practice establishes that the semantic content of the Constitution provides rules of constitutional law. This post establishes criteria by which this claim can be assessed and shows that these criteria are met.
Reply to Griffin, Part Eight: The New Deal and Living Constitutionalism--The idea of living constitutionalism emerged during the Warren Court era. The most plausible version of living constitutionalism (which does not deny that the Constitution has hard core of fixed semantic content) is compatible with semantic originalism.
Reply to Griffin, Part Nine: The Three Dimensional Space of Constitutonal Theory--There are three distinct dimensions of argument in constitutional theory, semantic, legal, and moral: the three dimensions need to be kept distinct if conceptual confusion is to be avoided.
