期刊名称：Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
印刷版ISSN：0017-8039
电子版ISSN：1943-5061
出版年度：2011
卷号：46
期号：1
出版社：Harvard Law School
摘要：Modern criminal procedure and substantive criminal law are scarce in
doctrinal remedies for addressing inequities in the system. This Article presents
an argument for invigorating the void-for-vagueness doctrine and rethinking its
relevance for addressing the issues of race, inequality, and discrimination in the
criminal justice system. Traditionally concerned with the clarity of laws to provide
fair warning of prohibited conduct, the vagueness doctrine experienced a
marked transformation when the Supreme Court recognized a more substantive
value underlying vagueness—preventing discriminatory enforcement. The Article
traces the emergence of the equality rationale for vagueness and links the
ascendance of this strand with the growing egalitarianism of the First Amendment
during the civil rights era. From there, the doctrine was soon grafted to
more traditional equal protection concerns. While remaining a doctrine rooted
in due process and rule of law principles, the vagueness doctrine became an
alternate means of achieving equality within the framework of liberty. In some
ways, it offers a more efficacious doctrinal instrument than modern equal protection
law for confronting inequality and discrimination in our system of criminal
justice. Accordingly, this Article proposes reforms to the Court’s current
vagueness jurisprudence to maximize its capacity for redressing inequality in the
enforcement of criminal laws
