| Abstract
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This article offers one response, rooted in traditional Jewish and Islamic perspectives of what it means to have a rule of law, to the problem of indeterminacy in Western jurisprudence. Some Jewish and Muslim scholars have conceptualized the rule of law not as a system of objective, democratic, prospective, stable, and equally applied substantive norms, but as the commitment of the legal community to be broadly and deeply engaged with studying, interpreting, and applying the materials and methods of their legal tradition as the principal source of normative conduct. This way of thinking about law, which I call “law-as-engagement,” has been deployed by Jewish and Muslim scholars to leverage the incidence of indeterminacy, disagreement, and judicial subjectivity in law for the purpose of reinforcing rather than undermining the rule of law. This article offers one response, rooted in traditional Jewish and Islamic perspectives of what it means to have a rule of law, to the problem of indeterminacy in Western jurisprudence. Some Jewish and Muslim scholars have conceptualized the rule of law not as a system of objective, democratic, prospective, stable, and equally applied substantive norms, but as the commitment of the legal community to be broadly and deeply engaged with studying, interpreting, and applying the materials and methods of their legal tradition as the principal source of normative conduct. This way of thinking about law, which I call “law-as-engagement,” has been deployed by Jewish and Muslim scholars to leverage the incidence of indeterminacy, disagreement, and judicial subjectivity in law for the purpose of reinforcing rather than undermining the rule of law.
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