Download or read book Vagueness in Normative Texts written by Vijay K. Bhatia and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2005 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Normative texts are meant to be highly impersonal and decontextualised, yet at the same time they also deal with a range of human behaviour that is difficult to predict, which means they have to have a very high degree of determinacy on the one hand, and all-inclusiveness on the other. This poses a dilemma for the writer and interpreter of normative texts. The author of such texts must be determinate and vague at the same time, depending upon to what extent he or she can predict every conceivable contingency that may arise in the application of what he or she writes. The papers in this volume discuss important legal and linguistic aspects relating to the use of vagueness in legal drafting and demonstrate why such aspects are critical to our understanding of the way normative texts function.
Download or read book Vagueness and Law written by Geert Keil and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Legal theory has hitherto paid little attention to the differences between the various kinds of linguistic indeterminacy that are grouped under the heading of "vagueness", let alone to the various theories that try to account for 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. The chapters of the book are organized into three parts. The first part addresses the import of different theories of vagueness for the law, referring to a wide range of theories from supervaluationist to contextualist and semantic realist accounts in order to address the question of whether the law can learn from engaging with philosophical discussions of vagueness. The second part of the book examines different vagueness phenomena. The contributions in part 2 suggest that the greater awareness to different vagueness phenomena can make lawyers aware of specific issues and solutions so far overlooked. The third part deals with the pragmatic aspects of vagueness in law, providing answers to the question of how to deal with vagueness in law and with the professional, political, moral, and ethical issues such vagueness gives rise to.
Download or read book The Nature and Value of Vagueness in the Law written by Hrafn Asgeirsson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-10 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lawmaking is – paradigmatically – a type of speech act: people make law by saying things. It is natural to think, therefore, that the content of the law is determined by what lawmakers communicate. However, what they communicate is sometimes vague and, even when it is clear, the content itself is sometimes vague. This monograph examines the nature and consequences of these two linguistic sources of indeterminacy in the law. The aim is to give plausible answers to three related questions: In virtue of what is the law vague? What might be good about vague law? How should courts resolve cases of vagueness? It argues that vagueness in the law is sometimes a good thing, although its value should not be overestimated. It also proposes a strategy for resolving borderline cases, arguing that textualism and intentionalism – two leading theories of legal interpretation – often complement rather than compete with each other.
Download or read book The Nature and Value of Vagueness in the Law written by Hrafn Asgeirsson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-10 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lawmaking is – paradigmatically – a type of speech act: people make law by saying things. It is natural to think, therefore, that the content of the law is determined by what lawmakers communicate. However, what they communicate is sometimes vague and, even when it is clear, the content itself is sometimes vague. This monograph examines the nature and consequences of these two linguistic sources of indeterminacy in the law. The aim is to give plausible answers to three related questions: In virtue of what is the law vague? What might be good about vague law? How should courts resolve cases of vagueness? It argues that vagueness in the law is sometimes a good thing, although its value should not be overestimated. It also proposes a strategy for resolving borderline cases, arguing that textualism and intentionalism – two leading theories of legal interpretation – often complement rather than compete with each other.
Download or read book Philosophical Foundations of Language in the Law written by Andrei Marmor and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings together the best contemporary philosophical work in the area of intersection between philosophy of language and the law. Some of the contributors are philosophers of language who are interested in applying advances in philosophy of language to legal issues, and some of the participants are philosophers of law who are interested in applying insights and theories from philosophy of language to their work on the nature of law and legal interpretation. By making this body of recent work available in a single volume, readers will gain both a general overview of the various interactions between language and law, and also detailed analyses of particular areas in which this interaction is manifest. The contributions to this volume are grouped under three main general areas: The first area concerns a critical assessment, in light of recent advances in philosophy of language, of the foundational role of language in understanding the nature of law itself. The second main area concerns a number of ways in which an understanding of language can resolve some of the issues prevalent in legal interpretation, such as the various ways in which semantic content can differ from law's assertive content; the contribution of presuppositions and pragmatic implicatures in understanding what the law conveys; the role of vagueness in legal language, for example. The third general topic concerns the role of language in the context of particular legal doctrines and legal solutions to practical problems, such as the legal definitions of inchoate crimes, the legal definition of torture, or the contractual doctrines concerning default rules. Together, these three key issues cover a wide range of philosophical interests in law that can be elucidated by a better understanding of language and linguistic communication.
Download or read book Tax Law and Racial Economic Justice written by Andre L. Smith and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-06-03 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No study of Black people in America can be complete without considering how openly discriminatory tax laws helped establish a racial caste system in the United States, how they were designed to exclude blacks from lucrative markets and the voting franchise, and how tax laws extracted and redistributed vast sums of black wealth. Not only was slavery nearly a 100% tax on black labor, so too was Jim Crow apartheid and tax laws specified the peculiar institution as “negro slavery.” The first instances of affirmative action in the United States were tax laws designed to attract white men to the South. The nineteenth-century Federal Tariff indirectly redistributed perhaps a majority of the profits from slavery from the South to the North and is the principle reason the Confederate states seceded. The only constitutional amendment obtained by the Civil Rights Movement is the Twenty-Sixth Amendment abolishing poll taxes in federal elections. Blending traditional legal theory, neoclassical economics, and a pan-African view of history, these six interrelated essays on race and taxes demonstrate that, even in today’s supposedly post-racial society, there is no area of human activity where racial dynamics are absent.
Download or read book Pragmatism and Vagueness written by Claudine Tiercelin and published by Mimesis. This book was released on 2019-06-13T00:00:00+02:00 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most early pragmatists, including the founder C. S. Peirce and L. Wittgenstein, vagueness was a real and universal principle and not a mere defect of our knowledge or thought. This volume begins by exploring this pragmatist notion of vagueness and the way it was tied to their basic opposition to various kinds of reductionism and nominalism. It then develops towards an analysis of Peirce’s original and wide views on vagueness, as seen through the angles of logic, semiotics, epistemology and metaphysics. In the final part of this book, the reader is presented with a case for the contemporary relevance of such a realistic pragmaticism for the ongoing debate on semantic, epistemic and ontic vagueness.
Download or read book Analytic Philosophy in America written by Scott Soames and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of recent and unpublished essays, leading analytic philosopher Scott Soames traces milestones in his field from its beginnings in Britain and Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, through its subsequent growth in the United States, up to its present as the world's most vigorous philosophical tradition. The central essay chronicles how analytic philosophy developed in the United States out of American pragmatism, the impact of European visitors and immigrants, the midcentury transformation of the Harvard philosophy department, and the rapid spread of the analytic approach that followed. Another essay explains the methodology guiding analytic philosophy, from the logicism of Frege and Russell through Wittgenstein's linguistic turn and Carnap's vision of replacing metaphysics with philosophy of science. Further essays review advances in logic and the philosophy of mathematics that laid the foundation for a rigorous, scientific study of language, meaning, and information. Other essays discuss W.V.O. Quine, David K. Lewis, Saul Kripke, the Frege-Russell analysis of quantification, Russell's attempt to eliminate sets with his "no class theory," and the Quine-Carnap dispute over meaning and ontology. The collection then turns to topics at the frontier of philosophy of language. The final essays, combining philosophy of language and law, advance a sophisticated originalist theory of interpretation and apply it to U.S. constitutional rulings about due process.
Download or read book Law and Cognitive Linguistics written by Mateusz Zeifert and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-10 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book advances the prototype theory of categorisation within a legal context. The work adopts a multidisciplinary approach and draws on insights from cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, and analytic philosophy to discuss semantic problems present in law. Designed as a bridge between cognitive linguistics and legal theory, it argues that categorisation is a crucial cognitive operation for the application of law and that theories of categorisation are relevant to legal theory. It makes the case that the prototype approach is better suited than more formal approaches usually utilised in jurisprudence to explaining many familiar linguistic problems found in law, such as vagueness, polysemy, the flexibility of meaning, the generality of language, context dependence of meaning, linguistic indeterminacy, and so on. The book focuses on problems of semantic analysis in law, both in concrete cases, that is, particular cases before courts, and, at the theoretical level, on methods of statutory interpretation. It will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers working in the areas of Law and Language, Legal Theory, Legal Philosophy, and Legal Linguistics.
Download or read book The Interpretation and Uniformity of the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration written by Dean Lewis and published by Kluwer Law International B.V.. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Numerous jurisdictions worldwide have augmented their ratification of the New York Convention of 1958 with the UNCITRAL Model Law 1985 (UML), which takes a giant step forward toward global uniformity in legal application and understanding of the arbitration process. This book develops a standard or benchmark for the UML objective of uniformity, using the relevant legislation and case law of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia to consider whether a uniform approach to implementation of the UML and its interpretation is being achieved across those jurisdictions. The author’s methodological tools are eminently adaptable to other jurisdictions. Given the importance of the ability to set aside an arbitral award, the body of case law on setting aside and the directly related area of enforcement, the emphasis throughout is on Article 34. In addition, the study considers: - the meaning of uniformity in law and in the context of the UML; - the correct approach to interpretation of the UML pre and post Article 2A; - the interpretational relationship between the UML and the Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG); - the relationship between the UML and the New York Convention; - the degree of textual uniformity of Article 34 with the three jurisdictions focused on; and - the degree of applied uniformity of Article 34 both in terms of juristic methodology and similarity of results. The author, with more than thirty years of practice in the field of commercial arbitration in Hong Kong, has had access to voluminous cases spanning decades and brings his specialist expertise to the subject. This book considers whether the UML has succeeded in its aim of achieving uniformity. It serves as a guide, both academic and practical, to exploring and adopting the correct approach to the interpretation of the UML as well as to the method of classification of court decisions under the UML. This study is of immeasurable academic and practical value.
Download or read book New Directions in LSP Teaching written by Jan Engberg and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first part of this book deals with specialized knowledge and its impact on LSP teaching; the second analyses the relation between teaching language for specific purposes and the processes of understanding; the third is dedicated to curriculum design.
Download or read book Vagueness A Guide written by Giuseppina Ronzitti and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-03-03 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores how vagueness matters as a specific problem in the context of theories that are primarily about something else. After an introductory chapter on the Sorites paradox, which exposes the various forms the paradox can take and some of the responses that have been pursued, the book proceeds with a chapter on vagueness and metaphysics, which covers important questions concerning vagueness that arise in connection with the deployment of certain key metaphysical notions. Subsequent chapters address the following: vagueness and logic, which discusses the sort of model theory that is suggested by the main, rival accounts of vagueness; vagueness and meaning, which focuses on contextualist, epistemicist, and indeterminist theories; vagueness and observationality; vagueness within linguistics, which focuses on approaches that take comparison classes into account; and the idea that vagueness in law is typically extravagant and that extravagant vagueness is a necessary feature of legal systems.
Download or read book Pragmatics and Law written by Francesca Poggi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the second part of a project which hosts an interdisciplinary discussion about the relationship among law and language, legal practice and ordinary conversation, legal philosophy and the linguistics sciences. An international group of authors, from cognitive science, philosophy of language and philosophy of law question about how legal theory and pragmatics can enrich each other. In particular, the first part is devoted to the analysis of how pragmatics can solve problems related to legal theory: What can pragmatics teach about the concept of law and its relationship with moral, and, in particular, about the eternal dispute between legal positivism and legal naturalism? What can pragmatics teach about the concept of law and/or legal disagreements? The second part is focused on legal adjudication: it aims to construct a pragmatic apparatus appropriate to legal trial and/or to test the tenure of the traditional pragmatics tools in the field. The authors face questions such as: Which interesting pragmatic features emerge from legal adjudication? What pragmatic theories are better suited to account for the practice of judgment or its particular aspects (such as the testimony or the binding force of legal precedents)? Which pragmatic and socio-linguistic problems are highlighted by this practice?
Download or read book Token A Journal of English Linguistics Volume 1 written by Sylwester Łodej and published by Jan Kochanowski University. This book was released on 2012-12-03 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Token focuses on English linguistics in a broad sense, taking in both diachronic and synchronic work, grammatical as well as lexical studies. That being said, the journal favors empirical research. All submissions are double-blind peer reviewed. Token is the original medium of publication for all articles that the journal prints. ISSN 2299-5900
Download or read book Legal Discourse across Cultures and Systems written by Vijay K. Bhatia and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What exactly is legal about legal language? What happens to legal language when it is used across linguistic, national, socio-political, cultural, and legal systems? In what way is generic integrity of legal documents maintained in multilingual and multicultural legal contexts? What happens when the same rule of law is applied across legal systems? By bringing together scholars and practitioners from more than ten countries, representing various jurisdictions, languages, and socio-political backgrounds, this book addresses these key issues arising from the differences in legal or sociocultural systems. The discussions are based not only on the analysis of the legal texts alone, but also on the factors shaping such constructions and interpretations. Given the increasing international need for accurate and authoritative translation and use of legal documents, this important volume has considerable contemporary relevance in a globalized economy. It will appeal to discourse analysts, commercial consultants, legal trainers, translators, and applied researchers in professional communication, especially in the field of legal writing and languages for specific purposes.
Download or read book Participation Culture and Democracy written by Tadej Pirc and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The underlying question of this collection of essays focuses on the very core of our democratic culture. It asks how one can actively take part in its political, legal, educational, informational, social, cultural and economic mechanisms. Advanced technologies have given rise to a vast array of tools enabling a culture of participation. New forms of civic engagement have emerged, as well as a new conceptualization of active citizenship. These developments encouraged the authors of this collection to address legal, social, political, philosophical, and media aspects of the emancipatory potential of participatory democracy. They focus on specific case studies stretching across various places and spheres, from the Canadian media legislature, community organizing in low-income neighbourhoods of the USA, the Knesset of Israel, the Roma minority in Poland, and legal texts of Austria, to the online sphere of art and digital democracy. The key advantage of this book thus lies in its multifaceted consideration of seemingly disparate, yet highly intertwined and ubiquitous, concepts of democratic societies around the globe.
Download or read book Ambiguity written by Susanne Winkler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-03-30 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume investigates the concept of ambiguity and how it manifests itself in language and communication from a new perspective. The main goal is to uncover a great mystery: why can we communicate effectively despite the fact that ambiguity is pervasive in the language that we use? And conversely, how do speakers and hearers use ambiguity and vagueness to achieve a specific goal? Comprehensive answers to these questions are provided from different fields which focus on the study of language, in particular, linguistics, literary criticism, rhetoric, psycholinguistics, theology, media studies and law. By bringing together these different disciplines, the book documents a radical change in the research on ambiguity. The innovation is brought about by the transdisciplinary perspective of the individual and co-authored papers that bridge the gaps between disciplines. The research program that underlies this volume establishes theoretical connections between the areas of (psycho)linguistics that concentrate on the question of how the system of language works with the areas of rhetoric, literary studies, theology and law that focus on the question of how communication works in discourse and text from the perspective of both production and perception. A three-dimensional Ambiguity Model is presented that serves as a theoretical anchor point for the analyses of the different types of ambiguities by the contributors of this volume. The Ambiguity Model is a hybrid model which brings together the different perspectives on how language and the language system work with respect to ambiguity as well as the question of how ambiguity is employed in communication and in different communicational settings. A set of specific features that are relevant for the description of ambiguity, such as whether the ambiguity arises in the production or perception process, and whether it occurs in strategic or nonstrategic communication, are defined. The research program rests on the assumption that both the production and the perception of ambiguity, as well as its strategic and nonstrategic occurrence, can only be understood by exploring how these factors interact with each other and a reference system when ambiguity is generated and resolved. The collection Ambiguity: Language and Communication constitutes a superb introduction to the workings of ambiguity in language and communication along with extensive analyses of many different examples from different fields. As such it is relevant for students of linguistics, literary studies, rhetoric, law and theology and at the same time there is sufficient quality analysis and new research questions to benefit advanced readers who are interested in ambiguity.
