How many laws have you broken today?

Harvey A. Silverglate, a criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer in Boston, has written extensively about vague language on college campuses and in the federal courts.

"The respective cultures of the college campus and of the federal government have each thrived on the notion that language is meant not to express one's true thoughts, intentions and expectations, but, instead, to cover them up. As a result, the tyrannies that I began to encounter in the mid-1980s in both academia and the federal criminal courts shared this major characteristic: It was impossible to know when one was transgressing the rules, because the rules were suddenly being expressed in language that no one could understand.

"I would not approve of speech codes on campuses even if they were clear in specifying the language that could get a student tossed out of school, and even if the disciplinary hearings were fair and rational. But at least clear codes would have the benefit of giving students notice of what could get them disciplined or expelled. The combination of outlawing speech, doing so in terms that even an educated person could not understand, and trying the charge before a tribunal worthy of the court of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, is a particularly insidious stew.

"In the criminal justice system it's vagueness of federal law. The U.S. Department of Justice began prosecuting people, around the mid-1980s, under statutes and regulations that even I could not understand; what's worse, federal courts seemed not to recognize this obvious unfairness and convicted people of serious crimes carrying harsh sentences. Years ago I told my law firm colleagues, half-serious and half-sarcastic, that an average citizen could commit several federal crimes in any given day without even realizing it."