By the time the Ferengi had reached Sisko, he had already located, in his brain, the ambiguous and vague Federation statutes he intended to rely upon in his defense.

The majority then declined to afford the Corps the customary deference granted agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes.

The Florida Supreme Court was not interpreting an ambiguous statute, resolving a conflict, or filling in a blank space in the law.

Conventionalism denies this: a conventionalist judge has no reason for acknowledging consistency in principle as a judicial virtue or for dissecting ambiguous statutes or inexact precedents to try to achieve it.

The circuit court noted that normally, when dealing with an ambiguous federal statute, courts will defer to the administrative agency charged with implementing the statute.

Indian tribes are treated differently--the court noted that it has long been a principle of American jurisprudence that ambiguous statutes are to be construed in favor of the tribes.

Faced with an ambiguous statute or regulation, these judges, reared on the common law, too often treat the enacted text as just one more precedent to circumvent.

In Chevron v. EPA the Court held that a judge should defer to a reasonable agency interpretation of an ambiguous statute.

In construing an ambiguous criminal statute, the court should resolve the ambiguity in favor of the defendant.

Jacobs concluded that the ambiguous statute did not give notice of the forbidden conduct to laymen, or set boundaries to prosecutorial discretion.