See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/231834461

Vagueness, interpretation, and the law

Article  in  Legal Theory · September 2009

DOI: 10.1017/S1352325209990012

CITATIONS READS

11 636

1 author:

Ólafur Páll Jónsson

University of Iceland
18 PUBLICATIONS   29 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Ólafur Páll Jónsson on 14 April 2015.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Legal Theory, 15 (2009), 193–214.
C Cambridge University Press, 2009 0361-6843/09 $15.00 + 00
!
doi:10.1017/S1352325209990012

VAGUENESS, INTERPRETATION,
AND THE LAW∗
Ólafur Páll Jónsson
University of Iceland

It is widely accepted that vagueness in law calls for a specific interpretation of the
law—interpretation that changes the meaning of the law and makes it more precise.
According to this view, vagueness causes gaps in the law, and the role of legal
interpretation in the case of vagueness is to fill such gaps. I argue that this view is
mistaken and defend the thesis that vagueness in law calls only for an application of
the law to the case at hand, leaving the meaning of the law intact.

I. INTRODUCTION

In this paper I argue that vagueness in law does not raise any special issues
about interpretation, that is, I am defending the following thesis:

No-Interpretation Thesis:
Vagueness in law does not call for a special interpretation of the law.

This goes against a strong trend in legal theory where vagueness in the
statute is seen to call for special interpretation. Ronald Dworkin is a well-
known friend of this view. Here, for instance, is a quote from his 1978 paper,
“Is There Really No Right Answer in Hard Cases?”:

It is open for a lawyer to argue, for example, as I have myself, that the impact
of the statute on the law is determined by asking which interpretation, of
different interpretations admitted by the abstract meaning of the term, best
advanced the set of principles and policies that provides the best political
justification for the statute at the time it was passed.1

∗ The ideas in this paper were first developed at the conference on Law, Language, and
Interpretation at the University of Akureyri, Iceland, Spring 2007, and then at the conference
on Language and Law at the Center for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo, Norway,
June 2008. I am grateful to the participants at these conferences for helpful discussions. I also
thank Matti Eklund for helpful comments. The paper is greatly improved due to comments by
two anonymous referees for this journal.
1. RONALD DWORKIN, A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE 129 (1985). The paper was originally published
in 1978.

193
194 ÓLAFUR PÁLL JÓNSSON
Scott Soames defends a quite different role for interpretation, and yet he,
too, argues that vagueness in law calls for interpretation of the law:
the job of interpretation is simply to discern [the content of the law] from
the linguistic meaning of the text, plus the context in which it was produced.
If [the lawmakers didn’t implicitly encoded a discretionary standard into the
law], then the job of the interpretation is to formulate one—thereby creating
new law by precisification.2

The difference between the views of Dworkin and Soames, on the one
hand, and my view, on the other, is variously relevant for legal theory and
practice. It has consequences for our understanding of precedent in the case
of a ruling in a borderline case; it is also relevant for the idea of judge-made
law and for the relation between legal language and ordinary language. I
do not, however, discuss these aspects in detail but focus on two things: first,
I bring out clearly the difference between the two kinds of views, focusing
on the formulation by Scott Soames, and second, I offer some arguments
in favor of the No-Interpretation thesis. But before I get to the difference
between the two kinds of views I describe, for purposes of exposition, a hy-
pothetical scenario and two distinct cases of vagueness which it gives rise to.

Scenario
A law is passed that makes it illegal to paint houses pink. Call it the No Pink
Houses law. A group of people, who call themselves the Pink Society, decides
to undermine the law. They buy a huge amount of red paint and divide it
into a thousand equal parts, enumerated P1 , P2 , P3 , . . . P1000 , each of which
is large enough to paint a whole house. Then they add a splash of white
paint into P1 , they add two splashes of white paint into P2 , three splashes of
white into P3 , and so on. The result is that P1 is still clearly red, whereas P1000
is virtually white. The colors in between form a spectrum from red through
pink to white.3 Then the members of the Pink Society paint their houses
in the various colors ranging from red through pink to white. It should be
clear enough that very many members of the Pink Society have broken the
No Pink Houses law.
Case One
It is a general principle in the application of law that like cases should
be treated alike.4 The ideal of fairness rests on this principle as well as
the relevance of precedent. But given this principle, vagueness can easily
generate a problem. Consider the following course of events:

2. SCOTT SOAMES, Interpreting Legal Texts: What Is, and What Is Not, Special about Legal Texts, in
1 PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS 419 (2008).
3. This example is adapted from Vann McGee and Brian McLaughlin, Distinctions without a
Difference, 33 S.J. PHIL. 203–251 (Supp. 1995).
4. See TIMOTHY ENDICOTT, VAGUENESS IN LAW 57–58 (2000).
Vagueness, Interpretation, and the Law 195
Suppose that Dick painted his house with P100 , which is clearly pink. He
is charged with breaking the law by painting his house pink and is taken to
court and convicted. He does not object to this but demands that like cases
should be treated alike and points to Harry, who painted his house with P99 .
Now Harry is taken to court and convicted of breaking the law. And just
like Dick, he demands that like cases should be treated alike and points to
Tom, who used P98 for his house. And so on. In the end Susan, who painted
her house with P1 , which is clearly red and not pink, faces the judge. On
the principle that like cases should be treated alike, she, too, is convicted of
having broken the No Pink Houses law.
Susan then appeals the case and is acquitted on the grounds that her
house is clearly red and not pink. The same happens to Judy, who used P2
for her house, and Sally, who used P3 . And so on, until we come to Tom,
Dick, and Harry. On the grounds that like cases should be treated alike,
they are also acquitted, even though their houses are clearly pink.
Case Two
Consider now the principle that criminal liability does not arise unless one
can be shown to be guilty. Consider Smith, who is a member of the Pink
Society and painted his house with P20 , which is on the border of pink and
red. Think only of this single instance (not the series from P1 to P1000 )
and suppose that the authorities charge Smith with violating the No Pink
Houses law. While painting the house, Smith was unsure whether he was
violating the law, but now, when facing the charges, he is convinced that he
will win the case. Or, even better, he is convinced that the authorities do not
even have a case against him. Because the color of his house is a borderline
instance of pink, it cannot be shown to be pink rather than red, and hence
Smith cannot be shown to have violated any law.5 If it cannot be established
that someone has violated a law, it is clear that he is not liable for violating
the law. This is puzzling since it seems to transform all borderline cases of
violation of the law into clear cases of nonviolation of the law.6

II. VAGUENESS

In classical semantics, a predicate divides the set of entities into two subsets:
those entities to which the predicate applies and those to which it does
not apply. Once vagueness is taken into account, one cannot assume that
a predicate like “tall” divides the set of entities into two complementary
subsets, those entities to which it applies and those to which it does not
apply. We get entities with a third status, the borderline cases. So we have the
tall men, for instance Al Gore, we have the nontall men, for instance Woody

5. See id. at 58–59.

6. This is a point that Dworkin makes much of; see, e.g., RONALD DWORKIN, Is There Really No
Right Answer in Hard Cases, in A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE (1985), esp. the section “The Argument
from Vagueness.” I discuss it further in Section III.
196 ÓLAFUR PÁLL JÓNSSON
Allen, and then there are those who are neither tall nor nontall (or they
are at least neither clearly tall nor clearly nontall, or they are questionable
members of either group, or they are borderline cases of being tall, or. . .).
The first systematic attempts to deal with vagueness focused on certain
consequences of vagueness for logic. Instead of two-valued logic—that is,
logic that operates on two truth values, T and F—a third value, I, standing
for “indeterminate”, was introduced, and philosophers tried to recover as
much of classical logic as possible.7 However, it soon became evident that this
would not do and truth-functionality would have to be given up. Consider,
for instance, the sentence:

(1) Harry is tall.

Supposing that Harry is a borderline case of a tall man; this sentence

should get the truth value I. Given truth-functionality, a sentence of the
form “If A, then B” should receive the truth value “I” when both parts of the
sentence have the truth value “I”. But the sentence:

(2) If Harry is tall, then Harry is tall

should, all the same, be true. Or replace one occurrence of “tall” with
“short,” and sentence (2) becomes false even if the parts of the sentence
have the truth value I. Once considerations of this kind come to mind,
questions arise showing that in order to say something sensible about the
logic of vagueness—or the logic for a vague language—one needs a semantic
or metaphysical theory of vagueness. In 1958 Henrik Mehlberg advanced
an outline of such a theory:

A vague term may be characterized tentatively as one the correct use of which
is compatible with several distinct interpretations. The term “Toronto” is vague
because there are several methods of tracing the geographic limits of the city
designated by this name, all of them compatible with the way the name is
used. It may be interpreted, for instance, either as including some particular
tree on the outskirts of the city or as not including it.8

Mehlberg then goes on to discuss the relevance of this idea for the truth
of sentences containing vague words:

A statement including vague terms may nevertheless be either true or false if

its truth-value is not affected by the multiplicity of their admissible interpreta-
tions. Such a statement is true (or false, as the case may be) if it remains true
(or false) under every admissible interpretation of the vague terms it contains.

7. Timothy Williamson has a good discussion of these issues in TIMOTHY WILLIAMSON, VAGUE-
NESSch. 4 (1994).
8. HENRIK MEHLBERG, THE REACH OF SCIENCE (1958), reprinted as Truth and Vagueness, in
VAGUENESS: A READER 86 (R. Keefe & P. Smith eds., 1996).
Vagueness, Interpretation, and the Law 197
Thus, although both “Toronto” and “Canada” are vague terms, it is neverthe-
less true that Toronto is in Canada, because this statement remains true under
any admissible interpretation of the two geographical terms it contains. . . . The
statement “The number of trees in Toronto is even” becomes true under some
of the admissible interpretations of its subject and false under the remaining
interpretations; it is therefore neither true nor false.9

Mehlberg notes that although bivalence is affected by vagueness, the law

of the excluded middle need not be affected. And this leads to the conclu-
sion that “the ordinary connection between the truth value of a disjunction
and the truth values of its members does not apply to statements with vague
terms.”10 Mehlberg offers the following disjunction as an example of a state-
ment that is true even if both its disjuncts are indeterminate:

(3) The number of trees in Toronto is even or the number of trees in Toronto is
odd.

In 1975 Kit Fine offered an account of vagueness and a logic to go with

it, based on ideas that are entirely in line with those of Mehlberg.11 But
Fine goes much further in developing them, changing intuitive ideas into
a worked-out theory of meaning and logic for vague natural language. The
basic idea behind his account is a two-level structure called supervaluation.12
First Level
Vague terms admit of precisifications. The term “red” is vague, but it could,
in principle at least, be made more precise without affecting its definite
extension or definite antiextension. To make a term more precise consists
in reducing the set of objects to which the term neither applies nor fails to
apply.
Second Level
Truth in a language—say truth in English—is defined with respect to ac-
ceptable precisifications of the vague terms in the language rather than
with respect to the terms as they in fact stand. In an acceptable precisifi-
cation, logic and semantics are classical. The fact of vagueness in natural
language means that for very many predicates there are various different
acceptable precisifications that are, as far as determinate extensions and
antiextensions of the vague terms are concerned, equally good.13

9. Id. at 86–87.
10. Id.
11. Kit Fine, Vagueness, Truth and Logic, 30 SYNTHESE 265–300 (1975), reprinted in VAGUENESS:
A READER (R. Keefe & P. Smith eds., 1996). Many philosophers simply accepted Fine’s account
of vagueness, and those who did not had to begin by explaining why they did not.
12. Fine borrowed the idea of supervaluation from a philosopher of science, Baas van
Fraassen, who had used it to deal with change in meaning of theoretical terms. See Van
Fraassen, Singular Terms, Truth-Value Gaps and Free Logic, 63 J. PHIL.418–495 (1966).
13. A precisification is simply an assignment of meaning to a predicate in such a way that
there are no borderline cases. A precisification of “red” is simply an assignment of meaning
198 ÓLAFUR PÁLL JÓNSSON
For illustration, consider a series of houses whose color ranges from red
through pink to white. To simplify things, suppose we single out five houses
from the series:
Definitely Red Definitely Pink Definitely White
P1 P20 P30 P100 P1000
P1 is definitely red, P20 and P30 are on the border of red and pink,
whereas P100 is definitely pink and P1000 is definitely white. A complete
precisification of “red,” “pink,” and “white” consists in drawing a sharp line
dividing the spectrum into sections to which the predicates “red,” “pink,”
and “white” apply without a reminder. This might be done in different ways.
One precisification would have “red” apply to P20 and “pink” apply to P30 ,
another would have “red” apply to both P20 and P30 , and the third would
have “pink” apply to both. But no matter how the spectrum is divided, the
sentence:

(4) P20 is red or P20 is pink

is going to be true. In one precisification it is true because P20 is red; in

another it is true because P20 is pink. The same is the case for the sentence:

(5) P20 is red or P20 is not red.

In one precisification the sentence is true since P20 is red, in another

precisification it is true because it is not red. However, the sentence:

(6) P20 is red

is true in some precisification but false in others. Truth in a language—say,

truth in English—is then defined in the following way:

A sentence is true only if it is true in all admissible precisifications; a sen-

tence is false only if it is false in all acceptable precisifications; a sentence is
indeterminate only if it is true in some admissible precisifications and false in
others.

This treatment of vagueness has many virtues. First, it respects the com-
monsense intuition that terms such as “heap,” “red,” and “pink” are vague
while it can at the same time accommodate the intuition that sentences
such as (4) and (5) are true whereas (6) is not true.14
to the predicate in such a way that everything either falls under the predicate or does not
fall under the predicate. One such precisification has everything falling under the predicate,
even the clearly nonred things. Such a precisification would not be acceptable, since it alters
the status of things that are clearly nonred. A precisification of “red” is acceptable only if it
does not alter the status of the clearly (determinately, definitely) red things and the clearly
(determinately, definitely) nonred things.
14. There are certainly problems with supervaluation as an account of vagueness, but I
do not go into those matters since it is not my intention to defend a philosophical view of
Vagueness, Interpretation, and the Law 199
Fine’s account of vagueness can illuminate many aspects of the problems
of vagueness in law. It may actually have more appeal in the legal context
than in the context of ordinary language. This is a point that Scott Soames,
for instance, acknowledges and that I discuss further in Section V.

III. VAGUENESS AND LAW

In considering how vagueness affects law, one might have in mind any of
three questions:
(Q1) Where does vagueness appear in the law?
(Q2) What is the relevance of vagueness as it appears in the law?15
(Q3) What resources are there to deal with vagueness in the law?

In what follows I am concerned mainly with (Q3), which I call the question
of applicability. I discuss questions (Q1) and (Q2) mainly insofar as they are
relevant for addressing the question of applicability.
One possible answer to the question of applicability is that there is nothing
special about law with respect to vagueness that sets it apart from other
activities that rely on linguistic practices. If that is right, law is still variously
affected by vagueness, since language is variously so affected. And just as
there may be no answer to an ordinary question of the form “Is this pink?”
where “this” refers to an item whose color is on the border between red and
pink, so a comparable question in the context of law might lack an answer.
This view has been contested, most notably by Ronald Dworkin, who claims
to defend the “unpopular view” that even in cases affected by vagueness
there may be a right answer.16
The “unpopularity” of Dworkin’s view derives, no doubt, from the fact
that it seems to contradict the obvious, namely that in the face of vagueness
it may be indeterminate whether a rule applies or not. As Timothy Endicott
puts it, “One possible objection to the right answer thesis [Dworkin’s thesis]
is that if the language of a legal rule is vague, there is no right answer to a
question of whether the rule applies in a borderline case.”17
This objection to Dworkin’s view rests on the presupposition that judg-
ments in legal language are affected by the fact of vagueness in more or less
the same way as judgments in ordinary language are affected. But that need
not be so.
One thing to notice is that the relevance of vagueness in law is different
from the relevance of vagueness in ordinary language and communication.

vagueness generally. However, the supervaluation framework helps me to formulate certain

questions about vagueness in law and draw out certain consequences of vagueness for the
relevance of legal interpretation.
15. See Timothy Endicott, The Value of Vagueness, in VAGUENESS IN NORMATIVE TEXTS (V.K.
Bhatia, J. Engberg, M. Gotti & D. Heller eds., 2005).
16. See, e.g., DWORKIN, Is There Really, supra note 6.
17. ENDICOTT, supra note 4, at 63.
200 ÓLAFUR PÁLL JÓNSSON
Usually when issues of vagueness arise in ordinary language, one need not
worry about them too much. It does not really matter whether a particular
house is described using the predicate “pink” or the predicate “red.” Such
vagueness may certainly cause theoretical problems for philosophers and
linguists but rarely does it have any practical consequences. It is at most
a cause for a minor quarrel in the family, and unless the members are
excessively stubborn, this quarrel will run its course in one afternoon. So
one might say that vagueness does not matter that much in real life. It is
not even clear why strict uniformity among the users of a language should
be considered to be of a particular value. In law, however, uniformity is not
only of value but of fundamental importance, for we do not want matters of
rights and duties and guilt or innocence to vary among the citizens without
a material difference to account for the variation. (Case one above highlights
exactly this.)
Further—and here we come to the kind of reasons Dworkin uses to de-
fend his view—there might be resources to deal with vagueness in the legal
framework that are not available in language generally. This is what Dworkin
is getting at when he draws a distinction between the fact of vagueness and
the consequences of vagueness:

It is a very popular idea among lawyers that the vagueness of the language
they use guarantees that inevitably there will be no right answer to certain
legal questions. But the popularity of this idea is based on a failure to discrim-
inate between the fact and the consequences of vagueness in canonical legal
language.18

The reasoning behind Dworkin’s idea derives from the idea that in order
to apply a legal rule in a particular case, one must be able to show that the
rule applies in the case in question. This should entail that criminal liability
does not arise in a borderline case, which, in turn, would narrow the range
of the law to exclude the borderline cases. (This is the point made by case
two above.) The fact of vagueness would then not cause gaps in the law.
There is, I think, something quite right here in what Dworkin is saying. In
legal discourse there are extra resources to deal with vagueness. In ordinary
language, unlike legal discourse, there is no special demand that issues in-
volving borderline cases be resolved one way or the other. Sometimes one
might want to maximize truth, at other times one might want to maximize
falsehood, and in some cases one might want to maximize indeterminacy.
Moreover, in ordinary language former decisions need not impose restric-
tions on later decisions; that is, in certain circumstances a particular shade
of color might be considered pink rather than red and in other circum-
stances it might be considered red rather than pink without any norm of
language or communication being violated. In short, there is no general

18. DWORKIN, MATTER, supra note 1, at 128.

Vagueness, Interpretation, and the Law 201
norm of language use that encourages speakers to maximize truth, falsity, or
indeterminacy or to strive for strict uniformity either across time or across
different cases at the same time.
However, I do not think that Dworkin’s argument succeeds in supporting
his conclusion. The argument falters on the fact of higher-order vague-
ness, as Timothy Endicott stresses: “The objection to Dworkin’s argument is
that it ignores the problem of higher-order vagueness.”19 Endicott actually
overstates his point, for Dworkin does not ignore higher-order vagueness20
though he does not deal convincingly with it.21 I do not go into the ar-
guments of Endicott and Dworkin here, for they are not essential for my
purposes. After all, I am not defending Dworkin’s thesis that there is virtually
always a right answer in legal cases, only the thesis that vagueness does not
call for a special interpretation of the law. But Dworkin’s claim that there
are extra resources to deal with vagueness is going to be relevant when we
consider the plausibility of the view that vagueness in law calls for a special
kind of interpretation: legal interpretation.

IV. VAGUENESS AND JUDICIAL DECISIONS

It belongs to natural law, according to Aquinas, “to avoid offending those

among whom one has to live.”22 Suppose now that in a certain society this
means, among other things, that people should not paint their houses in
colors that are offensive to their neighbors. The No Pink Houses law is then
introduced to give specific content to the claim that people should not paint
their houses in colors that are offensive to their neighbors. But as we have
seen, the No Pink Houses law is itself vague.
One question now is whether a judge could go one step further toward a
more determinate classification of conduct as admissible or nonadmissible.
Could a judge, for instance, legitimately rule that a house painted in a par-
ticular shade of pink is a violation of the law whereas a house that is painted
in a color that is ever so slightly more toward red is not a violation of the
law? Rephrasing this as a general question about legitimacy of judicial deci-
sions and borrowing the notion of precisification from the supervaluation
framework, we might ask:

19. ENDICOTT, supra note 4, at 64.

20. See, e.g., DWORKIN, Is There Really, supra note 6, at 130.
21. Dworkin does discuss this objection briefly but not convincingly. His response to the
argument from higher-order vagueness rests on an understanding of indeterminate status (i.e.
neither true nor not true) as a definite truth status, or, to put things differently, he treats “I”
as referring to a third truth value in addition to “T” and “F.” As a result, if the sentence “P30 is
pink” is assigned the truth value I, then the sentence “‘P30 is pink’ is true” is assigned the truth
value “F.” But that need not be so.
22. AQUINAS, 28 SUMMA THEOLOGIÆ: LAW AND POLITICAL THEORY 1a2æ, Q94, art. 2 (Cambridge
University Press, 2006).
202 ÓLAFUR PÁLL JÓNSSON
(Q1 ) Can a judge make legitimate distinctions that are a matter of indifference as
far as the statute goes, as long as the distinctions fall within an admissible
precisification?

Or, to put things differently:

(Q2 ) Can a judge make legitimate distinctions that are not grounded in the law that
justifies the making of such distinctions, as long as the distinctions constitute
admissible precisifications of the law?
(Q3 ) If a precisification of a law is admissible, is it not open to a judge to make such
a precisification even if it involves making distinctions that are not prescribed
by the law itself?

Let me call the view that we get by answering these questions in the
affirmative the precisification view. I take the following thesis about law to be
a consequence of the precisification view:

(C1 ) A law can warrant the making of a distinction even if the distinction as such is
not grounded in the law.

We can also formulate the precisification view as a thesis about the role of
judges:

(C2 ) In a court ruling, judges can legitimately make distinctions that are not
grounded in the law.

The precisification view differs from that of Dworkin in an important

respect. Dworkin’s idea is that in legal disputes there is a right answer
and what makes the answer right is that it is dictated by the law and the
standard resources and practices within the legal system. In Dworkin’s view
the role of the judge is to find the right answer. Things turn around in the
precisification view; there may be no single right answer to be found, though
there is a right answer to be made. A judge who rules in a borderline case
gives an answer, and if the answer is legitimate—that is, if it constitutes an
admissible precisification—then the answer is also a right answer.
The rationale behind the precisification view, whether it is understood
as a thesis about law or about judges, is quite simple: to borrow the idea
of an admissible precisification from the supervaluation view and use it
as a defining constituent for the notion of legitimate decision. The notion
of admissible precisification comes from a linguistic view about vagueness
in language. People say that the thoughts and practices of speakers of a
language determine (together with some other facts) that certain entities
fall under a predicate such as “pink” and that certain other entities do not
fall under the predicate. Then there are those entities of which it is not
settled by the thoughts and practices of speakers whether they fall under
the predicate or not. These are the borderline cases. However, one can
imagine that the thoughts and practices of the speakers could be made more
Vagueness, Interpretation, and the Law 203
definitive so as to reduce the range of borderline cases without altering the
status of those entities that are determined to fall under the predicate or
determined not to fall under it. The result would be a precisification of
the predicate, and since it does not alter anything that has already been
decided, it is called admissible. It only affects those cases that have not yet
been decided.23
Likewise, we could think of a ruling in a borderline case as admissible
on the grounds that the case was, so to speak, waiting for a decision to be
made. A law such as the No Pink Houses law determines the status of certain
houses; the pink houses constitute a violation of the law. But the presence
of the vague predicate “pink” in the law makes it an open question whether
a house whose color is on the border of red and pink constitutes a violation
of the law. This means that there are certain decisions that are left to the
judges to make, namely, decisions regarding borderline cases.24
In the next section, I discuss the relation between precisification and legal
interpretation. The former is a notion defined in the formal supervaluation
framework, whereas the latter belongs to a long-standing institutional tra-
dition of law.

V. PRECISIFICATION AND INTERPRETATION

From the perspective of a supervaluation view of vagueness, there is an

important difference between the legal context and ordinary language. In
the former there is someone in particular who is in a position to precisify
the vague legal language, whereas in the latter no one is in such a position.
In ordinary language there is not as much of a division of labor as in the
legal context, and as far as there is a division of labor in ordinary language,
its function is not to reduce vagueness. As a result, even when vagueness
in ordinary language has clear practical consequences, little can be done
in the way of precisification, for no one is in a position to bring about a
precisification. If the range of borderline cases gets narrower over time,
that will just be a feature of general use of language and not a result of
someone’s decision. In the legal case, things are quite different. Facing a
decision in a borderline case—say, having to decide whether the owner of
the house painted with P30 has broken the No Pink Houses law—the judge
might (after exhausting all the relevant resources) simply rule that a house
painted with P30 constitutes a violation of the law. In this case the judge
would have made a right decision, since (i) he made a decision and (ii) his

23. In this view, what makes a certain case borderline is a lack of decision rather than a
decision to classify it in such a way. That, however, may well be questioned. See Fine, supra note
10, at 126.
24. George C. Christie notes that there are certain “purposive uses of vagueness” in law:
“vague language may also be used because a law giver may have a general idea of what he
wants to accomplish but may be uncertain as to what specific conduct to prohibit.” George C.
Christie, Vagueness and Legal Language, 48 MINN. L. REV. 889–890 (1963–1964).
204 ÓLAFUR PÁLL JÓNSSON
decision was legitimate. This is the central thesis of the precisification view
described above.
The precisification view as spelled out above does, however, leave open
the question of how one should understand the notion of a precisification,
that is, it does not specify whether or how a ruling in a borderline case
affects the meaning of the law. One could take the idea of precisification
quite literally, maintaining that a ruling in a borderline case precisifies the
law by interpreting it in such a way as to make its meaning more definite. I
refer to this view as the Interpretation thesis:

Interpretation Thesis:
By making a decision in a borderline case, a judge offers an interpretation of the
statute with respect to the case in question and thereby changes the meaning of
the statute.

According to the Interpretation thesis, a legal decision in a borderline

case may be judged to be right not because it follows from the law but
because it effects an admissible precisification of the law. This view of the
role of the judge has certain implications both for our understanding of the
lawmaking role of judges and for the truth conditions of legal language. If a
ruling by a judge in a borderline case precisifies the law, then the sentence:

(7) P30 is pink

becomes true because it was decided by the judge that it should be true. The
customary semantic features of the constituent parts do not determine that
the sentence is true; they leave it indeterminate. It is only the special role
of the judge and the fact that her decision has consequences for the status
of sentence (7) that result in (7) being true.
The Interpretation thesis is defended by Scott Soames:

the first step in adjudicating the case is to examine the legislative history to
discover whether the lawmakers implicitly encoded a [discretionary] standard
into the law. If they did, then the content of the law determinates the outcome
of the case, and the job of interpretation is simply to discern that content from
the linguistic meaning of the text, plus the context in which it was produced. If
they didn’t adopt such a standard, then the job of interpretation is to formulate
one—thereby creating new law by precisification.25

Soames then continues:

This generation of new content by filling gaps in the original text is another
respect in which legal interpretation is importantly different from some other
kinds of linguistic interpretation. This special gap-filling role is justified by
the fact that the court has no alternative, if it is to decide the case at all, and

25. SOAMES, supra note 2, at 419 (emphasis added).

Vagueness, Interpretation, and the Law 205
by the fact that legislators are well aware of this aspect of adjudication, and
often deliberately employ vague language with future judicial precisification
in mind26

The idea here is that by ruling in a borderline case, a judge changes the
law—she makes it more precise by eliminating some borderline cases. This
means, for instance, that once a decision in a borderline case has been
made, then, if a similar case comes up again, it will not be a borderline case
but a clear case of either being subject to the law or not, depending on
the previous ruling. This is also the understanding of George C. Christie in
“Vagueness and Legal Language”:

vague language may also be used because a law giver may have a general
idea of what he wants to accomplish but may be uncertain as to what specific
conduct to prohibit. He decided on some vague general standard which can
evolve through a series of individual applications, a general standard which
can even change in content as the nature of society changes. Perhaps the most
famous of such general standards are the “due process” provisions in the fifth
and fourteenth amendments to the [American] Constitution.27

If we accept this understanding of precisification, we should say that by

ruling in a particular way, a judge changes the law by assigning different and
more specific meaning to the statute. The judge changes the law by giving
a specific content to a vague statement. Here the notion of an interpretation
is indeed appropriate, even if different from some other kind of linguistic
interpretation, as Soames points out.

VI. APPLICATION OR INTERPRETATION

In the previous section I describe the view that a decision in a borderline

case involves a special kind of interpretation—legal interpretation. The
Interpretation thesis may seem a natural way of applying the supervaluation
framework to vagueness in law, but there is another—and more modest—
understanding of the precisification view available. According to this view, a
ruling in a borderline case involves only an application of the law and does not
result in any change in the meaning of the law. I call this the Application thesis.

Application Thesis:
By making a decision in a borderline case, a judge applies the vague statute to
the borderline case without changing the meaning of the statute.

Both the Interpretation thesis and the Application thesis rely on the
notion of admissible precisification as defined in a supervaluation account of

26. Id. at 419 (emphasis added).

27. Christie, supra note 23, at 889–890.
206 ÓLAFUR PÁLL JÓNSSON
vagueness. But although the formalism of supervaluation is well developed,
how one should understand it in the legal case is unclear (nor is it clear how
one should understand it in the linguistic case). In particular, it does not
determine whether one should take a precisification of a vague term to be
an interpretation of the term (and thereby affect the meaning of the term)
or whether a precisification of a vague term involves only an application of
the term (and thereby affects only what we do with language and not its
meaning).
The word “interpretation” might get in the way here. Sometimes “inter-
pretation” is used so generously that it is impossible to apply a term or a
rule sensibly without interpreting it.28 When I draw a distinction between
interpreting the law and applying the law, I presuppose a narrower concept of
interpretation, one where a distinction between interpreting a law and sim-
ply applying it makes sense. My understanding of “interpretation” goes back
to Wittgenstein’s dictum that there is a way of understanding a rule that is
not an interpretation and which shows itself in the rule being followed or
broken on particular occasions.29 I suggest those who insist that all appli-
cation of a word (or a rule) involves an interpretation of the word should
view the difference between the Application thesis and the Interpretation
thesis as a difference between two kinds of interpretations, one that leaves
the meaning of the word intact and another that changes the meaning
of the word. The following example should bring out the difference
between the two theses.
Suppose a judge rules that a particular house painted with P20 —and thus
borderline between red and pink—is a violation of the No Pink Houses law.
A little later another house painted with the same color is discovered in a
different neighborhood. Now, according to the Interpretation thesis, the
ruling in the latter case should be straightforward, for although the newly
discovered house used to be a borderline case of the No Pink Houses law,
it is not so anymore. It is simply a violation of the law.
According to the Application thesis things are not so straightforward. The
latter house will still be a borderline instance of constituting a violation of
the law, and although the previous ruling is certainly relevant, it is relevant
only as a precedent and not as an event that has changed the meaning
of the statute. The owner of the latter house might argue in his defense
that the cases were not comparable due to various nonlinguistic features—
say, the neighborhood being more shady, or nearby houses having similar
colors, making the relevant comparisons different, or the people in the
neighborhood being generally more tolerant of offending colors, and so
on—so that the house should not be considered to constitute a violation of
the law. Moreover, even if the two cases were utterly comparable, the latter
house would still constitute a borderline case, which should be relevant

28. See ENDICOTT, supra note 4, at 11–13.

29. See LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS §201 (1953).
Vagueness, Interpretation, and the Law 207
when deciding on a sentence for the violation, for a sentence in a borderline
case should, other things being equal, be milder than a sentence in a clear
case, even if the clear case is just a minor violation.30
My point is that there is substantial difference between the Interpretation
thesis and the Application thesis. However, one might still question this by
alluding to context sensitivity of vague words. Contextualists’ approaches to
vagueness hold that it is characteristic of vague words that their extensions
may change from one context to another. This could accommodate the view
that a ruling in a borderline case makes the statute more precise (by giving
an interpretation of it) and yet allow that the extension of the relevant
words changes from one context to another. According to contextualism
about meaning, a house in the series from red through pink to white may
change status on different occasions of evaluation, that is, a house that is
considered pink when compared to a house that is ever so slightly more
pink may be considered borderline pink on an occasion when compared
to a house that is ever so slightly redder.31 But the legal case does not allow
for such a variation, for a house that has been judged pink and has thereby
given rise to a conviction of the owner cannot be considered a moment later
borderline pink for similar legal purposes. This shows that contextualism
has less appeal in the legal case than in the case of ordinary language.
However, one might suggest a more modest version of contextualism
according to which the meaning of a word like “pink” could be sensitive to
certain kinds of context changes, such as going from one neighborhood to
another. This, however, would not undermine the difference between the
Interpretation thesis and the Application thesis because one can think of
features that would be relevant for the question of violation of the law in
a borderline case without being relevant for the meanings of the relevant
terms. The tolerant character of the people in one neighborhood and the
intolerant character of the people in another could be such a feature.
I do not intend the above example to support one thesis rather than the
other, only to underline their difference. The following example by R.M.
Sainsbury does, on the other hand, speak in favor of application rather than
interpretation:

No one can criticize an art materials shop for organizing its tubes of paint
on various shelves, including one labeled “red” and another “yellow,” even
though there is a barely detectable, or perhaps even in normal circumstances
undetectable, difference between the reddest paint on the shelf marked “yel-
low” and the yellowest paint on the shelf marked “red.”32

30. I thank Stephen Neale for suggesting this example.

31. See Diana Raffman, Vagueness and Context-Relativity, 81 PHIL. STUD. 41–47 (1995); and
Raffman, How to Understand Contextualism about Vagueness: A Reply to Stanley, 65.3 ANALYSIS
244–248 (2005) for an exposition of contextualism about vagueness.
32. R.M. Sainsbury, Concepts without Boundaries, Inaugural Lecture at King’s College,
London University (Nov. 6, 1990), in VAGUENESS: A READER 259–260 (R. Keefe and P. Smith
eds., 1996).
208 ÓLAFUR PÁLL JÓNSSON
A worker in an art materials shop does not narrow or close the gap
between the meaning of the words “yellow” and “red” by organizing the
tubes as described in the example. One should not describe the practice of
arranging paint one way rather than another as involving an interpretation
of the relevant words. By arranging the clearly red tubes on the shelf marked
“red” and the clearly yellow tubes on the shelves marked “yellow,” the worker
shows that he understands the words and, moreover, one might say that he
applies them so as to bring order to the arrangement of tubes of paint
in the store. The same goes for the tubes whose color is on the border
between red and yellow. If several tubes of paint were sold from the shelf
marked “yellow,” the worker might rearrange the tubes and take a few of
the yellowest tubes on the shelf marked “red” and move them to the shelf
marked “yellow.” We should not say that by rearranging the tubes, the person
has reinterpreted the words “red” and “yellow.” The meanings of the words
guide his action, that is, he applies the words “red” and “yellow.” When the
tubes have been rearranged after some yellow tubes have been sold, what
changes is not the meaning of the meaning but simply the circumstances of
use.
Moving to the legal case, I must of course acknowledge that by ruling in a
borderline case a judge may set a precedent and thereby narrow the space of
legitimate rulings in the future. But although the space of legitimate rulings
has been reduced by the setting of a precedent, the statute (or the legal
text, what the law says) may be just as vague as before; what was a borderline
case before the ruling is a borderline case after the ruling. Notice that the
worker in the art materials shop might be working in circumstances that
are normative in a manner similar to the legal case. He might, for instance,
have to be consistent in the way he arranges materials in the shop, be able to
offer good reasons for why he arranges things one way rather than another,
and in general, he might be following the general demand that customers
should be able to recognize that there is a reasonable order to the things in
the store. All this might be in place, and yet he might rearrange the tubes
after having sold some of the yellow ones without changing the meaning of
the words “red” and “yellow.”
This example speaks in favor of application rather than interpretation.
Are there other examples that pull us in the opposite direction? The ex-
ample by Christie about the due process provisions—granting individuals a
right not to be punished without a due process of law (Fifth Amendment)
and a right to equal protection (Fourteenth Amendment)—does actually
suggest that what happens in a judicial ruling is interpretation resulting in
a changed law and not just the application of a law that leaves the meaning
of the law intact. In fact it seems reasonable that the due process provisions
must be interpreted and reinterpreted as time evolves and society changes.
In a footnote Christie notes: “It is obvious that ‘due process of law’ and ‘the
equal protection of the laws’ evolve in meaning with the development of
man.”
Vagueness, Interpretation, and the Law 209
But we should be careful here. Are the due process provisions an instance
of vague law or are they perhaps rather an instance of ambiguous law? Notice
that the vagueness (if such there is) does not give rise to a typical paradox
of vagueness. Of course there is vagueness associated with the due process
provisions, for questions about how much aid one must be able to get, or
how good an opportunity one must have, or how much respect one must be
shown, and so on all give rise to vagueness. But that is not what Christie has
in mind, for the question that he considers is whether due process means
adopting standard A or standard B, where A and B may be quite different
standards. Here the case of the due process provisions is more like the
case of sacrilegious contracts discussed by Dworkin33 and hence is better
described as a case of ambiguity than a case of vagueness.34
Another example from Christie is instructive in this respect, for it has
been taken to involve either vagueness or ambiguity:

the attempt to distinguish among slight negligence, negligence, gross negli-

gence and recklessness . . . are familiar. Many of the attempts were prompted by
the provisions of automobile guest statutes that exempted the owner and/or
driver from liability for negligence but imposed liability for either gross neg-
ligence or recklessness. The manner in which these statutes were framed
indicated that the legislature felt that not only were gross negligence and reck-
lessness distinguishable but that gross negligence could be distinguished from
negligence. Judge Magruder’s description of Chief Justice Rugg’s method of
distinguishing among negligence, gross negligence and recklessness is in-
structive: It was simply the difference “among a fool, a damned fool, and a
God-damned fool.”35

The difference between negligence, gross negligence, and recklessness

is described as a typical vague difference or a difference susceptible to
vagueness. And the description of Chief Justice Rugg’s method of drawing

33. See, e.g., Dworkin’s discussion of the word “sacrilegious” in Dworkin, MATTER, supra note
1, at 128–131.
34. Ambiguous expressions bear some resemblances to vague expressions. Consider the
following sentence:
(a) That book is light.
The sentence can be true because of the color or the weight or because it is an easy reader.
The sentence as such does not determine which reading is appropriate, and in the absence
of further evidence (which might be provided by the circumstances of utterance) it may be
genuinely indeterminate which reading is appropriate. But it may be determined all the same
that on a particular occasion one of those readings is the right one. Now, suppose the book
in question is Aristotle’s De anima. Then, on the reading that the book does not weigh much,
sentence (a) is determinately true, on the reading that it is an easy reading, sentence (a) is
determinately false.
An ambiguous sentence such as sentence (a) can be disambiguated by adding further
information, that is, by reducing the number of possible readings. A complete disambiguation
would eliminate all but one reading. Disambiguation of a sentence or a predicate consists in
an interpretation of that sentence or predicate.
35. Christie, supra note 23, at 899.
210 ÓLAFUR PÁLL JÓNSSON
a distinction shows an attempt simply to apply another vague measure. But,
Christie continues a little later:

Eventually many courts threw up their hands and declared that there were no
degrees of negligence, that there was no practicable difference among slight
negligence, negligence and gross negligence. The only workable distinction
was between negligence and recklessness. The distinction between the two
was said to lie in the fact that negligence was to be determined solely by
objective standards, whereas recklessness required a type of mens rea. It was
this mens rea which was said to distinguish recklessness from negligence and
not any necessary difference in the objective manifestations of the behavior
being examined.36

Here we see how the courts turned an issue of vagueness into an issue
of ambiguity—and resolved the ambiguity by selecting a specific meaning,
that is, interpreting “recklessness” as involving mens rea. Where Chief Justice
Rugg saw a spectrum involving vagueness extending from slight negligence
to recklessness, many courts saw an ambiguity between two kinds of cases
where one was decided by objective standards and the other by similar
objective standards plus a certain frame of mind.
The understanding of Chief Justice Rugg does not sit well with the in-
terpretation view. Suppose that in certain circumstances a person is judged
to have shown negligence but not gross negligence. A little later a similar
case comes up, and now a judge must decide whether the case in question
is one involving slight negligence, negligence, or gross negligence. What
can she do? She can and should look at the previous ruling, but that ruling
will not provide her with a clearer meaning of the terms “slight negligence,”
“negligence,” and “recklessness” as they appear in the statute, though it may
provide her with various reasons for describing the case using one of those
terms—reasons that might involve equally vague standards as to whether
the person in question was a fool, a damned fool, or a God-damned fool.
But the relevant reasons need not be the kind of reasons that would change
the meaning of the statute but simply reasons that justify the application of
a particular term to the case at hand. And all such reasons, accessible or
inaccessible to the judge, may in the end fail to dictate a right answer. And
yet the judge has to rule; she has to decide for the case at hand whether it
was a violation of the law or not.37

36. Id. at 899–900.

37. Sainsbury offers the following example:

arguments that use the vague concept to establish or overthrow a sharp ruling are alike
inadequate. We can no more argue that aborting a foetus of this age is right because it is
not a person than we can argue that it is wrong because it is a person, if person is vague
at the crucial point. In general, only pragmatic justification could be found for drawing a
legal line in an area where there are no relevant boundaries.
Vagueness, Interpretation, and the Law 211
VII. LANGUAGE OF LAW AND ORDINARY LANGUAGE

I am offering an account of vagueness in law drawing on theories of superval-

uation as an account of vagueness. This is what I call the precisification view. I
also spell out two understandings of this view—the Interpretation thesis and
the Application thesis—and offer some reasons for preferring the second to
the first. According to the Interpretation thesis, the idea of a precisification,
as developed by Kit Fine and others, should be taken quite literally—even
more so than in the linguistic account of vagueness for ordinary language.
According to the Application thesis, the idea of a precisification only helps
to spell out a space for legitimate action; it is a kind of a background device
that is helpful in specifying what can legitimately be done and what not.
Applying the law in a borderline case does not, on this account, call for a
specific interpretation of the law. Taken together with the precisification
view, this leads to the thesis mentioned at the outset:

No-Interpretation Thesis:
Vagueness in law does not call for specific interpretation of the law.

I do not think my arguments in favor of the Application thesis—and

thereby in favor of the No-Interpretation thesis—are conclusive; I admit
that the issue is complicated and turns not only on an understanding of the
notion of precisification but also on the distinction between ambiguity and
vagueness. A proper judgment of the two alternative understandings of the
precisification view would need to rely on an examination of more cases.
But rather than doing that, let me change the focus and look more broadly
at the relation between legal language, ordinary language, and justice.
One criticism of supervaluation as a model for vagueness in language
is that the very notion of a precisification is out of place. That a word
is vague is not really a defect of the word but an essential feature of it that
derives from its circumstances of application, perceptual and cognitive skills
of people, and the principles of communication in general. However that
may be, the notion of precisification seems to fit much better in the legal
context than in the context of ordinary language. One can easily think
of actual precisifications in the context of law—this is one of the central
ideas behind the Interpretation thesis. This suggests that one might use
supervaluation, taken quite literally, as a model for dealing with vagueness
in law. But it also suggests that the language of law and ordinary language
could develop in different ways, and that might be problematic for reasons
of justice.

Sainsbury, supra note 31, at 264. When Sainsbury says that only pragmatic justification for a
ruling is forthcoming, I take it that he subscribes to something like the application thesis, for
he would want to resist the idea that such justifications might effect a change in meaning of
the vague concepts involved.
212 ÓLAFUR PÁLL JÓNSSON
Consider one of the fundamental ideas in John Rawls’s theory of justice,
namely, that of a well-ordered society. Three things are of central importance
for this idea:

First . . . it is a society in which everyone accepts, and knows that everyone else
accepts, the very same political conception of justice. . . .
Second, society’s basic structure—that is, its main political and social in-
stitutions and the way they hang together as one system of cooperation—is
publicly known, or with good reason believed, to satisfy those principles of
justice.
Third . . . citizens have a normally effective sense of justice, that is, one that
enables them to understand and apply the publicly recognized principles of
justice, and for the most part to act accordingly as their position in society,
with its duties and obligations, requires.38

The worry now is that if the language of law departs from ordinary lan-
guage, then that might undermine the society as well ordered. It is the third
item here that is of special relevance. If the language of law departs from
ordinary language in some fundamental sense, then it is unclear that the
citizens can “understand and apply the publicly recognized principles of
justice, and for the most part act accordingly as their position in society,
with its duties and obligations, requires.”
The point can be illustrated by the above example of negligence. The
publicly recognized duties and obligations demand that one should not
show negligence and definitely not gross negligence and recklessness. But
what does that mean? What kind of demand is this? The public content
of this demand is given by the ordinary understanding of the terms “neg-
ligence,” “gross negligence,” and “recklessness.” These terms are vague in
ordinary language and remain so despite various rulings of courts, for such
rulings are not among the data that ordinary people rely on in either learn-
ing or applying those terms. The vagueness of the demand seems, therefore,
to be an unavoidable feature of the publicly recognized duties and obliga-
tions. If the legal demand with respect to negligence and recklessness is
made precise as a result of judicial interpretation of the law, this means that
the principle of justice with respect to negligence and recklessness will not
be publicly recognizable. And should something like that happen on a large
scale, the principles of justice would not be publicly recognizable and the
society in question would not be well ordered.
This observation should count in favor of the Application thesis rather
than the Interpretation thesis, for the basic functioning of the legal system
should not undermine it as a system of justice, that is, as a system that
both constitutes and maintains a just society by regulating the behavior of
the society. If this is right, then it seems that the Application thesis ought

38. JOHN RAWLS, JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS (2001).

Vagueness, Interpretation, and the Law 213
be preferred to the Interpretation thesis even if, as a matter of fact, legal
practitioners take it to be the other way around.

REFERENCES

Aquinas, Thomas. (2006) Summa Theologiae: Law and Political Theory, vol. 28, 1a2æ,
90–97 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press).
Burnyeat, Miles. (1982) “Gods and Heaps,” in Malcolm Schofield and Martha C.
Nussbaum, eds., Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy Presented to
G. E. L. Owen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press).
Christie, George C. (1963–1964) “Vagueness and Legal Language,” Minnesota Law
Review 48: 885–911.
Dworkin, Ronald. (1977) Taking Rights Seriously, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth).
———. (1985a) A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
———. (1985b) “Is There Really No Right Answer in Hard Cases,” in A Matter of
Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
———. (1991) “On Gaps in the Law,” in Neil MacCormick and Paul Amselek, eds.,
Controversies about Law’s Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
———. (1998) Laws Empire, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Hart Publishing).
Endicott, Timothy. (2000) Vagueness in Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
———. (2005) “The Value of Vagueness,” in Vijay K. Bhatia, Jan Engberg, Maurizio
Gotti, and Dorothee Heller, eds., Vagueness in Normative Texts (Bern, Germany:
Peter Lang).
Fine, Kit. (1975) “Vagueness, Truth and Logic,” Synthese 30:265–300, reprinted in
Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith, eds., Vagueness: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1996).
Geach, Peter. (1980) Reference and Generality (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
Keefe, Rosanna, and Smith, Peter, eds. (1996) Vagueness: A Reader (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press).
Lewis, David K. (1993) “Many but Almost One,” in J. Bacon, K. Campbell, and L.
Reinhardt, eds., Ontology, Causality and Mind: Essays in Honour of D.M. Armstrong
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press).
Lyons, David. (1995) “The Concept of Law (Second Edition) by H.L.A. Hart,” Law
Quarterly Review 111:519–523.
McGee, Vann. (1998) “‘Kilimanjaro,”’ in Ali A. Kazmi, ed., Meaning and Reference
(Calgary: University of Calgary Press).
McGee, Vann, and Brian McLaughlin. (1995) “Distinctions without a Difference,”
Southern Journal of Philosophy 33 (Supp.):203–251.
Mehlberg, Henrik. (1958) The Reach of Science Toronto: Toronto University Press),
partly reprinted as “Truth and Vagueness,” in Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith,
eds., Vagueness: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
Moline, Jon. (1969) “Aristotle, Eubulides and the Sorites,” Mind 78, 311:393–407.
Raffman, Diana. (1995) “Vagueness and Context-Relativity,” Philosophical Studies
81:41–47.
———. (2005) “How to Understand Contextualism about Vagueness: A Reply to
Stanley,” Analysis 65.3:244–248.
Rawls, John. (2001) Justice as Fairness (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press).
 214 ÓLAFUR PÁLL JÓNSSON
Russell, Bertrand. (1923) “Vagueness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy and Psychol-
ogy. 1:84–92, reprinted in Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith, eds., Vagueness: A Reader
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
Sainsbury, R.M. (1996) Concepts without Boundaries, Inaugural Lecture at King’s
College, London University (Nov. 6, 1990), reprinted in Rosanna Keefe and Peter
Smith, eds., Vagueness: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Soames, Scott. (2008) “Interpreting Legal Texts: What Is, and What Is Not, Special
about Legal Texts,” Philosophical Essays vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press).
van Fraassen, Baas. (1966) “Singular Terms, Truth-Value Gaps and Free Logic,”
Journal of Philosophy 63:481–495.
Williamson, Timothy. (1994) Vagueness (London: Routledge).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1953) Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

View publication stats