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Page Number: 34

16 

JOHNSON v. UNITED STATES 

THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment 

In  one  of  our  most  recent  decisions  nullifying  a  law  on 
vagueness  grounds,  substantive  due  process  was  again
lurking in the background.  In Morales, a plurality of this 
Court  insisted  that  “the  freedom  to  loiter  for  innocent 
purposes  is  part  of  the  ‘liberty’  protected  by  the  Due  Pro-
cess  Clause  of  the  Fourteenth  Amendment,”  527  U. S.,  at 
53, a conclusion that colored its analysis that an ordinance 
prohibiting  loitering  was  unconstitutionally  indetermi-
nate,  see  id.,  at  55  (“When  vagueness  permeates  the  text
of ”  a  penal  law  “infring[ing]  on  constitutionally  protected
rights,” “it is subject to facial attack”).

I  find  this  history  unsettling.    It  has  long  been  under-
stood that one of the problems with holding a statute “void 
for ‘indefiniteness’ ” is that “ ‘indefiniteness’ . . . is itself an 
indefinite concept,” Winters, supra, at 524 (Frankfurter, J.,
dissenting),  and  we  as  a  Court  have  a  bad  habit  of  using 
indefinite  concepts—especially  ones  rooted  in  “due  pro-
cess”—to invalidate democratically enacted laws. 

B 

It  is  also  not  clear  that  our  vagueness  doctrine  can  be 
reconciled  with  the  original  understanding  of  the  term 
“due process of law.”  Our traditional justification for this
doctrine has been the need for notice: “A conviction fails to 
comport  with  due  process  if  the  statute  under  which  it  is
obtained  fails  to  provide  a  person  of  ordinary  intelligence 
fair  notice  of  what  is  prohibited.”  United  States  v.  Wil-
liams,  553  U. S.  285,  304  (2008);  accord,  ante,  at  3.  Pre-
sumably,  that  justification  rests  on  the  view  expressed  in 

—————— 

it comes to restricting the speech of abortion opponents, the Court has 
dismissed concerns about vagueness with the observation that “ ‘we can 
never  expect  mathematical  certainty  from  our  language,’ ”  Hill  v. 
Colorado,  530  U. S.  703,  733  (2000),  even  though  such restrictions  are
arguably  “at  least  as  imprecise  as  criminal  prohibitions  on  speech  the 
Court  has  declared  void  for  vagueness  in  past  decades,”  id.,  at  774 
(KENNEDY, J., dissenting).