Abstract

Clearly, vagueness is an inevitable feature of natural language. The practice of law, which is necessarily done within the confines of language, must inevitably come to grips with the phenomenon of vagueness. What philosophers working with these concerns tend to debate about is the extent to which vagueness affects law and the role that vagueness plays therein. Roy Sorensen argues that vagueness in law is not functional and therefore to be avoided as much as possible by judges. Sorensen equates the decisions that judges make about borderline cases with lying. Sorensen bases his conclusions in part upon the idea that borderline cases do admit of truth-values; it is simply the case that we do not have the means to discover these truth-values. I find that Sorensen may be too quick on the draw in accusing judges of the moral indiscretion of lying, and that judges, though perhaps acting insincerely in a truly minimal sense, are in fact not lying