Inhalt: | "Vague expressions are omnipresent in natural language. As such, their use in legal texts is virtually inevitable. If a law contains vague terms, the question whether it applies to a particular case often lacks a clear answer. One of the fundamental pillars of the rule of law is legal certainty. The determinacy of the law enables people to use it as a guide and places judges in the position to decide impartially. Vagueness poses a threat to these ideals. In borderline cases, the law seems to be indeterminate and thus incapable of serving its core rule of law value. In the philosophy of language, vagueness has become one of the hottest topics of the last two decades. Linguists and philosophers have investigated what distinguishes 'soritical' vagueness from other kinds of linguistic indeterminacy, such as ambiguity, generality, open texture, and family resemblance concepts. There is a vast literature that discusses the logical, semantic, pragmatic, and epistemic aspects of these phenomena. Bringing together leading scholars working on the topic of vagueness in philosophy and in law, this book fosters a dialogue between philosophers and legal scholars by examining how philosophers conceive vagueness in law from their theoretical perspective and how legal theorists make use of philosophical theories of vagueness Vagueness and law: philosophical and legal perspectives / Geert Keil and Ralf Poscher -- Philosophical and jurisprudential issues of vagueness / Stephen Schiffer -- Vagueness in law: placing the blame where it's due / Diana Raffman -- An intentionalist account of vagueness: a legal perspective / Ralf Poscher -- Can legal practice adjudicate between theories of vagueness? / Hrafn Asgeirsson -- Semantics, metaphysics, and objectivity in the law / Michael S. Moore -- Pragmatic vagueness in statutory law / Andrei Marmor -- Second-order vagueness in the law / Frederick Schauer -- The non-conservativeness of legal definitions / Marc Andree Weber -- The role of vagueness and context sensitivity in legal interpretation / Nikola Kompa -- Why it is so difficult to resolve vagueness in legal interpretation / Lawrence M. Solan -- Vagueness and political choice in law / Brian H. Bix -- Non-epistemic uncertainty and the problem of legal line drawing / Leo Katz -- Smoothing vague laws / Adam J. Kolber -- How vagueness makes judges lie / Roy Sorensen -- Clarity, thoughtfulness, and the rule of law / Jeremy Waldron |
