<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title></title><style type="text/css">p.MsoNormal,p.MsoNoSpacing{margin:0}</style></head><body><div style="font-family:Arial;">I have not read a lot about constitutional and or legal interpretation, but what I have read seems to be a very shallow echo of hermeneutics and exegesis philosophies and methods developed for religions texts, especially the Koran, Torah, and Bible. Maybe a course or two in literary hermeneutics should be prerequisite for getting a law degree and or a judgeship?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">I was part of a conversation recently with an ultra-liberal and arch-conservative that focused on 2nd amendment. The Lib stated that the 2nd applied only to militias and the kind of rifles owned by militia members at that point in history. A pretty familiar argument. The Con said this was wrong - that the 2nd is really about the populace having the means to overthrow a government that has become tyrannical. When written this meant semi-governmental militias with state of the art weaponry. Translated to today, that would mean Sheriff sanctioned "posses" / "militias" with RPGs, Stingers, and suitcase nukes.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><span class="highlight" style="background-color:rgb(255, 255, 0);"></span><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">The beer was cold, the <span class="highlight" style="background-color:rgb(255, 255, 0);">Valley Tan </span>was smooth and the argument was long and heated, but friendly.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">davew<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">Valley Tan — whisky brewed by Mormon pioneers from wheat and oats. Brigham Young had an exclusive license to distill it. Mark Twain and Brigham share a bottle or two when Twain visited. Sir Richard Burton shared same with Porter Rockwell when Burton passed through SLC.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">davew<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">On Wed, Sep 23, 2020, at 8:36 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Excellent! That helps. It seems reasonable to think one can be a <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> "living document textualist". I.e. you first identify the (perhaps <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> wide-ranging) set of relevant *enacted text*. Then you have some rules <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> by which you apply/infer meaning and implications of that text. An <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> originalist would differ from a livingist by grounding the text to the <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> historical context in which it was enacted versus the current context, <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> respectively. I think the categories aren't disjoint, though. My guess <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> is both types would *have* to do some translations like your example of <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> "nice". You can't do either context-grounding without some translation. <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> So, it's more like a bias than a category.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Re: "the law" -- The entry on constitutionalism in my "American <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Conservatism" encyclopedia claims that the modern conception of a <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> constitutional government is to *limit* the power of the government <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> w.r.t. the governed individuals, most obviously in the separation of <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> powers. And the author of the entry (Whittington) goes on to assert <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> that a US addition to the modern conception is "the notion of the <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> constitution as a fundamental law." What this might mean for the above <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> context grounding would be something like an "upper ontology" <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_ontology">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_ontology</a>. The core facility of <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> ontologies is the ability to (semi-automatically) translate from one <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> lexicon to another, identifying the same concepts in spite of variation <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> in the words used. If constitutions *are* some type of mechanism for <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> objectively distinguishing *scopes* (individual vs. government), then <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> what we mean by "law" is only *indicated* by the text, not ensconced <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> *inside* the text ... some kind of indirect, Platonic, non-naive <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> realist structure we're approaching with our various text documents.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Re-reading that entry resuscitated the question about what freedoms the <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Democrats are trying to take away. Do *laws*, by which I mean that <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> objective referent of the texts, primarily expand or limit freedoms? <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Laws like Obamacare seem to expand positive freedom *via* the negative <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> freedom from (e.g.) pre-existing conditions. But conservatives hate <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Obamacare for some bizarre reason. And this takes me back around to the <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> irritating question about mathematics, is it invented by us? Or <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> discovered by us? Are laws something fundamental to the composition of <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> collectives from individuals that we're discovering? Or are they <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> prescriptive, arrogant attempts to *engineer* the world, imputed by the <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> charismatic/influential/facile among us? If we could answer that, we'd <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> have some hints to your question about parties vs. orthogonal access to <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> the state of society.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> p.s. I've long been confused by the uptake of Maturana and Varela's <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> autopoiesis by legal scholars. Why would they be attracted to what <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> seems like theoretical biology to me? But perhaps there's more to the <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> relationship between science and law than I've ever thought to be the <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> case? Is law a kind of sociology? If so, then "theoretical law" and <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> theoretical biology might not be so different. <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> On 9/23/20 3:39 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> > I don’t know how one defines it as a method, but the approach I usually hear contrasted with Originalism comes associated with “living document” language. The idea being that any legal statement cannot take any meaning but in the context of its time (socially accepted norms, available knowledge of facts, social and material technologies and institutions, demographics and conditions of living, etc.), and that if those conditions have changed, there is no sensible way in which an appropriate meaning of a text can be derived without reference to the current context.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> > <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> > This seems to me sort of obvious and inescapable, in the sense that pre-Shakespeare, one would have used “nice” to mean a sharp, burning or cutting pain, but to expect or demand that everyone who heard the word today know that that was its intended meaning would be absurd. Likewise that “people” in “we the people” meant the anglo male landed gentry of the time, as opposed to “people” as the term would be used in non-Republican society today. <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> > <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> > An interesting problem this poses for me is how correctly to make the argument that a constitution should be a reasonably-stable, but reasonably-adaptable, document to reflect the sense of right in the society of its time, but not be tossed around by the winds of populism or fads or momentary cultural battles like identity contests or post-modern depredations of everything. To assert that the court should be responsive to the norms of the day, but that it should not be politicized (in the sense of, just an effector arm of political parties), when parties are the overwhelmingly dominant organizational structure throughout the modern era in the US, seems to be saying that the SCOTUS should have an independent, parallel, distributed sensor network to the state of the society, somehow protected from this massive gorilla of a power structure that has come to subsume every other institution. I like the idea of autonomous, parallel, distributed channels, but how to design one is not a question on which I think I have insight.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> -- <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 <a href="http://bit.ly/virtualfriam">bit.ly/virtualfriam</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> un/subscribe <a href="http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com">http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> archives: <a href="http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/">http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> FRIAM-COMIC <a href="http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/">http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/</a> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div></body></html>