"Open texture" of legal language

The paper deals with following issues. In his seminal work "Concept of Law" H.L.A. Hart famously claimed that both the law and legal language are open-textured. It is known that Hart borrowed the term "open texture" from his Oxford colleague Friedrich Waismann, whom he duly acknowledged as the inspiration for the conclusion that law as well as language is open-textured, but it is worth noting how the term changed meaning in the borrowing. According to Hart, legal concepts are not necessarily endowed with some uncertain meaning: indeed, it is not even possible to fully establish the meaning of some legal terms. In analyzing the operation of legal rules, H.L.A. Hart purported to adopt Friedrich Waismann's idea of "open texture" and adapt it to law. 1) Hart claimed that rules necessarily possess "a fringe of vagueness or 'open texture'", and he attributed the idea to Waismann. But it is not obvious that Hart and Waismann were talking about the same thing. Is the open texture of law more than the open texture of its language? 2) One problem is that Hart's language is ambiguous as between the view that vagueness and open texture are distinct, as Waismann argued, and the view that "open texture" is for Hart simply a synonym for "vagueness". But is Hart's claim correct? 3) Hart argued that language is consistently open-textured, but is there an open-texture of law distinct from, or at least going beyond, the open texture of the language in which legal rules are written? Hart seemed to believe so, but it is not at all clear that Hart was right in so believing. I will try to answer the main question for the purposes of my research project "Is the legal language or the language in which legal rules are written open-textured?" I will carefully consider main arguments against or for this question. I will attempt to argue that for Hart's theory of legal language the connection between "open texture" and vagueness is necessarily.

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