Genuine doctrinal ambiguity
Legal uncertainty that arises from the structure of the law itself, so that no amount of further research resolves it, as opposed to shallow ambiguity, a research gap whose answer exists but has not yet been found.
First used in Detecting Genuine Doctrinal Ambiguity
The distinction targets a failure the source paper calls false confidence: legal AI presenting contested conclusions as settled. A question of first impression in one jurisdiction that other jurisdictions have resolved is shallowly ambiguous. A persistent circuit split is genuinely ambiguous.
The paper operationalizes genuine ambiguity in five types: semantic (Hart's open texture), normative (balancing of competing principles), methodological (dueling canons), jurisdictional (acknowledged splits), and analogical (courts treating different precedents as controlling on similar facts).
It adopts an operational stance that sidesteps the Hart and Dworkin debate: a question counts as genuinely ambiguous when the legal system itself treats it as contested, through splits, hedging or vigorous dissent. The goal is a cartographer of the law's gray areas rather than an oracle.