The Importance of 'The Gap'

Abstract

One of the central dilemmas of law is what Larry Alexander has called "the gap:" general, determinate rules have significant benefits from the forward-looking perspective of a lawmaker, but generate outcomes that appear wrong from the perspective of individual actors. In this 25-year retrospective of Alexander's initial article on the gap, I examine a possible way out of the dilemma of the gap, and conclude that it does not work.