The Non-Conservativeness of Legal Definitions

The relevance of philosophical theories of vagueness to legal interpretation

“…Or we can, as again Endicott shows, use the phenomenon of higher-order vagueness in an argument against Dworkin's single right answer thesis. I myself use the (not uncontroversial) fact that vague terms in our natural languages are generally non-soritically vague to argue that if lawmakers wish legal language to be in line with natural language, they should avoid precisifying ordinary vague expressions-they should then, for instance, abstain from defining a child as a person who is not older than, say, fourteen, even if they make repeated use of the expression 'child' in their texts (see [9]). All these vagueness-based and law-affecting arguments are in perfect accordance with the Irrelevance Thesis, since they make only use of general features of the phenomenon of vagueness, but not of particular philosophical accounts to this phenomenon.…”