Dorf offers a critique of originalism, but he does not defend any alternative (or set of alternatives). For reasons that will become apparent, this way of proceeding is problematic. The question for constitutional theory is not originalism or not originalism: the relevant question is whether originalism is better than the alternatives. This means that evaluation of originalism should proceed by the method of pairwise comparison.
Pairwise comparison requires that originalism be compared to the alternatives: originalism versus common law constitutionalism, originalism versus pluralism, originalism versus moral readings, and so forth.
For example, Dorf argues that originalism is not more determinate than the alternatives, but his post does not even attempt to show that this is the case. He does argue that originalist judges make conservative decisions, but he does not even address the question as to what decisions they would have made if they had adopted an alternative methodology. For some alternatives, it seems obvious that originalism would be more constrain--even if originalist judges are highly imperfect. For example, if the court operated on the basis of the moral readings theory (advocated by Ronald Dworkin and James Fleming) then it seems likely that the originalist judges would have had even more conservative voting records. Justice Scalia made this point several times with respect to his votes in some First Amendment and Fourth Amendment cases.
It would be helpful if Professor Dorf would specificy what alternative or set of alternatives to originalism he has in mind when he claims that originalism is not more constraining than the alternatives.
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Dorf believes that originalism's past demonstrates that originalist judges are not practicing "honest originalism." In his original post, he relied on a study by Jessee and Malhorta. In Part Three of my series of posts, I demonstrated that this study does not show what Dorf asserts. Of course, there are many other studies of judicial ideology. For example, the Martin-Quinn scores for the Justices over time also place Scalia and Thomas on the right of the Court, with Alito sometimes ranked as more conservative than Scalia. But shifting to another study will not help Dorf. For reasons that Ward Farnsworth has explained in depth, Martin-Quinn scores simply will not serve the purpose to which Dorf puts them. These scores are not based on a data set of decisions in which originalism plays are role, and they simply have nothing to say about the question whether Scalia and Thomas failed to engage in "honest originalism." Moreover, generalizing about originalism on the basis of decisions by two Justices has obvious problems.
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