Determinism and Fuzziness

It is perfectly justified that the legal language should be accurate. It has been sufficiently proved to be right in the above-mentioned discussion. However, to be accurate is just a target of legal language. We dare not guarantee it to be faultless.

Otherwise, why are there so many legal dispute caused by the different understanding of legal language? Why the court makes the different legal explanations in the different situations? Why can some people crime without punishment? Legal language need blur while accuracy.

Sometimes we even believe the appropriately use of fuzzy language is one of the essential methods to guarantee the accuracy of legal language. The accuracy may be defined as the soul of legal text, because it is common in the history and the modern life that the lawsuit caused by the differences of a word.

Let’s look at the inheritance dispute document in the Arkansa state of American mentioned in the article by Li Wenyang [ 3 ]. Its argument is mainly revolved in the word “between” in the will. The will says, the remainders of the testator’s property should be divided equally between all of our nephews and nieces on casino online my wife’s side and my niece.

There are 22 nieces and nephews of the testator. Who on earth does one half of the inheritance belong to? Do the 22 nieces and nephews of his wife get one half? Do his nieces get the other? Do they share his property? Finally the judge drew a HDFS uses this approach to create hard drive repair replication efficiently by keeping hard drive repair on different racks so that even when one rack goes down, hard drive repair will still be served by the other rack. conclusion that the inheritance should be distributed in the former way.

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The reason is that “between” can only be used in two parties or in two sides. If distributing in the latter way, we should the used word “among”. That is to say, this makes an equal distribution on all nieces and nephews.

This example fully shows the importance of the accuracy to the legal text. At the same time, the fuzziness of legal language includes fuzzy words and fuzzy sentences. In this part, we want to discuss the use of the fuzzy words in legal English:

“Within” is often used in the terminology in fuzzy legal documents when regulating the quantity, deadline and scope. “within”(以内),“below”(以下),“not less than”(以下),“outside”(以外) etc. But these words themselves are inaccurate, and have to carry on the essential explanation to avoid its fuzziness.

The law formulated by the different countries naturally leads to the different meanings, such as the special strips in the Civil Law that: “above”, “below”, “within”, “expiration”, (including themselves), but words “does not fill”, “outside”, however, don’t include themselves.

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Fuzzy terminology expressing degree appears frequently in legal English, such as: adequate, approximately, obscene, promptly, satisfy etc. In a sense, the glossaries enumerated above have a strong fuzziness, while they at the same time get an accurate effect for legal language in the significance of established by usage.

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