Theorists have described legal indeterminacy by emphasizing three distinct sources of law's gaps. Holmes is committed to an ontic approach in which judges determine law by filling systemic gaps. Hart offers a semantic approach, focusing on the open texture of legal terms. Dworkin offers an epistemic approach, describing gaps as judicial uncertainty in applying relevant principles. Philosophers of vagueness have also taken ontic, semantic, and epistemic approaches. Because none seems satisfactory, contextualist theorists have offered an alternative. Shapiro describes vagueness within the...

The Arab Revolt against the Turks in World War One was, in the words of T.E. Lawrence, 'a sideshow of a sideshow'. Amidst the slaughter in European trenches, the Western combatants paid scant attention to the Middle Eastern theatre. As a result, the conflict was shaped to a remarkable degree by a small handful of adventurers and low-level officers far removed from the corridors of power. At the centre of it all was Lawrence. In early 1914 he was an archaeologist excavating ruins in the sands of Syria; by 1917 he was battling both the enemy and his own government to bring about the vision he...