theory-of-law
Are there any official or unofficial principles about if a law is sufficiently interpretable?
<p>I have been really interested in how it seems like there is an unavoidable limit to how sort of objective the meaning of a law can be. There are plenty of things in life where you can ask if some assertion a person has made is even well-defined; if it is even clear what it means, how to decide what meets a description and what doesn’t; or, more importantly, if it is subjectively up to people to decide what does and does not meet certain criteria, if they are illogically choosing cases based on conventions in their mind but which don’t seem to correspond to self-consistent principles; the decider may have a kind of self-consistency in the sense of regularity, only it isn’t clear if that’s arbitrary or if it has some principle that actually explains the decisions.</p>
<p>So, when people create laws, do they just subjectively decide if they think the law is sufficiently clear, not ambiguous, and interpretable, or is there any theory people refer to to try to decide if a law simply is unclear to the point of meaningless?</p>
<p>In a hypothetical case, if someone wanted to pass a gibberish law of randomly scrambled alphabetical letters, would legislators / judges freely say anything they wanted to, like, “The law doesn’t look good to me, I vote No”, or would they refer to a more rarefied or developed theory about what specific principles the law fails to attain, which is why they dispute it, like, “the principle of interpretability”? If so, what are the specifics of that theory?</p>

<p><a href="/questions/tagged/canada" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;canada&#39;" aria-label="show questions tagged &#39;canada&#39;" rel="tag" aria-labelledby="tag-canada-tooltip-container">canada</a></p>
<p>A law is impermissibly vague only when it prevents a court from giving sensible meaning to its terms. Difficulty, ambiguity, and <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_texture" rel="nofollow noreferrer">open texture</a> do not equate with impermissible vagueness. See generally, <em>Reference re: ss. 193 and 195.1(1)(c) of the Criminal Code (Man.)</em>, <a href="https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/611/index.do" rel="nofollow noreferrer">[1990] 1 S.C.R. 1123</a>.</p>
<p>At the legislative stage, there is no express theory of interpretabilty that legislators are using. This is a practical activity. The drafters attempt to convey a meaning consistent with their purposes. People vote according to the meaning that the words conjure in their minds. As Wittgenstein says, &quot;the meaning of a word is its use.&quot; Our shared concepts in public language spring forth from shared use.</p>
