On The Fuzziness Of The Language Of Criminal Judicial Interpretation And Its Overcoming

Criminal legislative language is usually abstract and general, with lots of fuzzy concepts. Criminal judicial interpretation, as the interpretation of criminal legislation in practice, is the concretion and clearness of the abstract fuzzy legislative language, therefore, the language of criminal judicial interpretation must be of certainty, so as to guarantee judicial operability, which is the basic requirement of the task of judicial interpretation of solving the problems of specific application of laws and decrees in trial and procuratorial work in unity. However, there still exists lots of fuzzy language in current criminal judicial interpretation, which makes us cannot help reflecting on the power and effect of judicial interpretation. The paper tries to analyze the performances, causes, disadvantages of the fuzzy language of criminal judicial interpretation, aiming to explore the ways of overcoming this defect.Except the introduction and conclusion part, the paper is composed of three parts with about 32,000 words.The first part is about the fuzziness of the language of criminal judicial interpretation and its performance. The paper first discusses the definition and characteristics of legal language, and gives a definition of fuzziness in linguistic context, pointing out that fuzziness is an inherent attribute of legal language and there can’t be complete certainty in legal language. And then, the paper analyzes the performances of fuzzy language in current criminal judicial interpretation from the semantic and pragmatic level and gives theoretical explanation from the perspective of epistemology and thinking, language semiotics and law, pointing out the causes of inevitability of fuzziness. At the end of this part, the paper gives examples of fuzzy language which are not necessary and has no explanations in the judicial interpretation itself and analyzes their possible disadvantages, questioning this kind of fuzziness.The second part is about the deviation of fuzziness from the task of judicial interpretation. Firstly, according to the relevant provisions of the 1979 The Court Organization Law of People’s Republic of China and 1981 The Resolution on the Strengthening of Legal Explanation of National People’s Congress Standing Committee, the paper points out that the task of judicial interpretation is to solve the problems of specific application of laws and decrees in trial and procuratorial work, ensuring correctness and unity of the specific application of law. Then, the paper puts forward the certainty requirement of the task of the judicial interpretation to the language of the judicial interpretation. Judicial interpretation should be clear in logic and semantics. Finally, it points out two specific standards of certainty: possibility of understanding and possibility of predicting, both being based on the common people and the judicial personnel.The third part is about the ways to overcome fuzziness of judicial interpretation, proposing ways to the reasonable and unreasonable fuzzy language of current judicial interpretation respectively. For the reasonable fuzzy language, as a result of its inevitability, it can only depend on the authority of the judge’s criminal interpretation in practice as a remedy. The paper analyzes the necessity of the existence of the authority of the judge’s criminal interpretation and raises the corresponding constraint mechanism suggestions. For the unreasonable fuzzy language, the paper proposes the overcoming ways from the language technology level and professional guarantee level respectively. The former includes the use of semantic analysis methods to explain, the restriction of the use of strong subjective adjectives and adverbs, stacked use of synonyms and enumerated type quantization of fuzzy concepts in legislation. The latter includes improving the quality of the personnel in judicial interpretation work and enhancing the publicity and democracy of judicial interpretation’s enactment.