Paralleling the summing problem associated with identifying a single intention of a multimember lawmaking body, the semantic summing problem appears when there are competing potential meanings for constitutional words or phrases. This chapter addresses the question of whether the new digital tools used in corpus linguistics searches have the potential to offer a “Big Data” solution to the problem. By examining the nature of the digital collections being searched, as well as the data analysis tools being employed, this chapter shows that corpus linguistics will not solve the semantic summing problem, and may well exacerbate it.

To determine the “will of the legislator,” William Blackstone pointed to “signs” of those intentions, the first of which is the words understood in their usual sense. This chapter will show the degree to which the words, even in context, have the potential to leave many important constitutional issues unresolved, hence the need for other evidence of the will of the lawmaker. In particular, this chapter will show that the “summing problem,” which has most often been associated with the difficulty of determining a single intention of the Framers, is matched by its semantic equivalent: the fact that the evidence of objective public meaning can lead to multiple potential meanings. To describe the problem, the chapter analyzes two clauses that have generated a great deal of litigation and interpretive controversy – the tax clauses and the Establishment Clause. In each case, there are multiple equally strong candidates for the objective public meanings of the words.

This chapter demonstrates how seeking the Framers’ intentions by reviewing the debates and drafting history leading to the final versions of the Constitution can resolve the semantic summing problem in the case of two highly contested and frequently litigated clauses: the tax clauses and the Establishment Clause. In doing so, it shows how, in practice, a search for the Framers’ intentions – that is, the end–means policy choices they made – can be done in light of the nature of the documentary record, and how it can resolve otherwise difficult interpretive tasks for which public meaning approaches are inadequate. In these cases, there is also evidence that the Framers’ understandings were known to the ratifiers and the public, and thus point to the meanings that were likely to have been understood by the those groups as well.