The meaning of camp

Until now I’ve missed this judicial review judgment from March, about byelaws relating to a women’s peace camp at Aldermaston. The challenge to the byelaws succeeded in part, because they would have criminalised putting a jumper down on a bench, but I’m more interested in the failed attempt to argue that making it an offence to camp in a defined area is too vague a prohibition to be legally certain, as camp is left undefined and could mean all kinds of things. I know you’re as anxious as me to ascertain the legal meaning of camp.

Honestly, though! Something that’s long driven me mad is the deep need of many people, most of them not lawyers in fact, constantly to want words defined as though that’s always essential to get at their meaning. The point about interpreting laws is not simply that you have to work out what a word means in an abstract sense; you have to go beyond that and decide whether a particular thing or circumstance falls within that meaning. All definition does in principle is replace one word with many more, against whose meaning we still, ultimately, have to judge the thing.

I’m not suggesting defining words is pointless: it’s very useful as a way of reducing a precise concept down to a simple, practical one (or two or three) word label, and in some contexts (embryology, say, or drug control) real scientific precision may be required so as to enable measurement, say, of whether the thing is the substance you want to regulate. But with any law, there comes a point beyond which further definition doesn’t help: the point where you just have to decide whether or not you think Ms. Smith the anti-weapons protester is or is not camping at Aldermaston. If you’re not capable of deciding that kind of thing, there really is no hope.