[SydPhil] Reminder: JSI Seminar - 18 April

[Kevin Walton]

Dear all

The next JSI seminar will take place at 6pm on Thursday 18 April, when Professor Andrei Marmor from the University of Southern California will deliver a paper entitled "Varieties of Vagueness in the Law". See below for further information. To register, please go to http://sydney.edu.au/news/law/457.html?eventcategoryid=40&eventid=10124.

I hope that you will attend. If you would like to go for dinner afterwards, please contact Michael Sevel (michael.sevel at sydney.edu.au<mailto:michael.sevel at sydney.edu.au>), who will chair the seminar.

Best wishes,
Kevin


Varieties of Vagueness in the Law

The main purpose of this paper is to articulate the different types of vagueness, and related linguistic indeterminacies, that we find in statutory language and to explain their different rationales. Professor Marmor argues that the various normative considerations involved in employing vague terms in legislation depend on the kind of vagueness in question. He shows that while some cases of vagueness in law are concerned with fairly standard problems of borderline cases, other are not. He also argues that semantic vagueness can be distinguished from conversational vagueness, which we also find in law, and that vagueness in law should be clearly distinguished from cases of ambiguity and polysemy.

Andrei Marmor is Professor of Philosophy and Maurice Jones Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Southern California. He is director of the USC Center for Law & Philosophy and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy, an on-line peer-reviewed journal in moral, political and legal philosophy. A prolific author on issues concerning the relations between law morality and politics, Professor Marmor has written Interpretation and Legal Theory (Oxford University Press, 1992; Hart Publishing, 2005); Positive Law & Objective Values (Oxford University Press 2001); Law in the Age of Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2007);  Social Conventions(Princeton University Press, 2009), Philosophy of Law (Princeton, 2011); and numerous journal articles. Professor Marmor earned his B.A. and M.A. in philosophy, as well as his LL.B., from TelAviv University and earned his DPhil from Oxford University. He was a professor at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and taught as a visiting professor at several universities before joining the USC Law and Philosophy faculties in 2002.
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