Successful rule operation is remarkable and never fully eliminates uncertainty.

Evidence

When a legal proposition functions successfully as a rule without the necessity of further elaboration, it needs again to be emphasized that some rather remarkable things have happened. The kind of situation bringing the rule into play has been accurately foreseen, and public policy with respect to it fully determined in advance. The rule has been successfully communicated to one or another of its addressees, and the addressee has properly identified the facts calling for its application. … Innumerable legal rules do manage this miracle of successful operation in many if not most of their applications. But for reasons already sufficiently explained there will remain points at least of peripheral uncertainty requiring elaboration. Indeed, it is probably a flat impossibility to frame a legal rule applying to any considerable mass of transactions without leaving these uncertainties. With respect to such matters the proposition, before it has been authoritatively elaborated, is at most an inchoate rule. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process, 2676

Categorization

• QUESTION: What exactly are the reasons for inevitable peripheral uncertainty, flagged but not spelled out here?
• XREF: connects to: The underlying standard keeps measuring an elaborated rule’s adequacy. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 2698; Enough confidence to guide action suffices; absolute certainty is not needed — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 104

Broader Connections

• Enough confidence to guide action suffices; absolute certainty is not needed #expands (0.80) — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age, 104