On the Instrumental Value of Vagueness in the Law

Abstract

It is natural to think that law ought not to be vague. After all, law is supposed to guide conduct, and vague law seems poorly suited to do that. Contrary to this common impression, however, a number of authors have recently argued that vagueness in the law is sometimes a good thing, because it is a means to achieving certain valuable ends. In this paper, I argue that many authors -- including Timothy Endicott and Jeremy Waldron -- wrongly associate vagueness with instrumental roles that are really played by a closely related semantic phenomenon.

Keywords: philosophy of law, jurisprudence, philosophy of language, law and language, vagueness, value, instrumental value