Roots
In the case of vagueness, a statute might be considered void on constitutional grounds. Specifically, roots of the vagueness doctrine extend into the two due process clauses, in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. The courts have generally determined that vague laws deprive citizens of their rights without fair process, thus violating due process.
The following pronouncement of the void for vagueness doctrine was made by Justice Sutherland in Connally v. General Construction Co., 269 U.S. 385, 391 (1926):
he terms of a penal statute must be sufficiently explicit to inform those who are subject to it what conduct on their part will render them liable to its penalties… and a statute which either forbids or requires the doing of an act in terms so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application violates the first essential of due process of law.Read more about this topic: Void For Vagueness
Famous quotes containing the word roots:
“He who sins easily, sins less. The very power
Renders less vigorous the roots of evil.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running underground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You know, honey, us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)