LEGAL WRITING AND THE AMBIGUOUS NATURE OF AMBIGUITY
LEGAL WRITING AND THE AMBIGUOUS NATURE OF AMBIGUITY

Summary/Abstract: Whereas in the literary and artistic realms ambiguity is often willfully employed in order to provide more fecund opportunities for interpretation, in fields such as physics, mathematics, logic, medicine, philosophy and law it is considered an error to be avoided. Disambiguation is of pivotal importance in law, since the legal discourse still is in dire need of clarity and precision, but these are features that can only be reclaimed if ambiguity is avoided or, at least, resolved. The purpose of this study is to differentiate between the two relatively similar concepts of ambiguity and, respectively, vagueness, and to discuss the various types of ambiguity that feature in an assortment of legal writing samples, in order to show that, more often than not, ambiguity can be shunned from legal drafting.

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