THE JOURNAL JURISPRUDENCE (2017) J. JURIS. 221 Leveraging Legal Indeterminacy: The Rule of Law in Jewish Jurisprudence Shlomo C. Pill Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish, Islamic, and American Law and Religion The Candler School of Theology, Emory University Senior Fellow The Centre for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University I. INTRODUCTION This article presents a unique way of thinking about the rule of law grounded in the Jewish legal tradition. It argues that that conceptualization of the rule of law can be used to address some of the salient challenges posed to law’s rule by the indeterminacy thesis in Western jurisprudence. Legal indeterminacy has been a perennial concern in Western jurisprudence for centuries. The indeterminacy thesis maintains that the totality of legal materials and methods available within a given legal system are often insufficient to determine single, uniquely correct answers to some important subset of the normative questions arising within that system. Officials charged with resolving such cases, then, must exercise some measure of personal discretion and subjective judgment in order to reach singular, final rulings. According to many scholars, such indeterminacy poses significant challenges to the legitimacy of legal and political systems. Normative justifications for coercive legal and political systems are often tied to a constellation of jurisprudential commitments subsumed under the heading, “the rule of law.” The rule of law, however, is widely understood to entail substantial legal determinacy. Legitimacy requires that legal norms be largely democratic, prospective, stable, equally applied, and objective. There must be right answers to normative questions; those answers must be determined by democratic lawmaking; and officials must apply and enforce those standards rather than their own personal preferences. Legal indeterminacy, however, suggests that legal sources and methods admit many different yet justifiable answers to most normative questions, and that therefore, singular answers to legal questions are ultimately products of subjective post-hoc judicial choices rather than objective, preexisting, and generally applicable standards adopted through democratic processes.