 Given these distinctive features of law, it may seem that logicians’ discussions of heaps and baldness are beside the point, and that legal reasoning is exempt from any implications that the paradox may have for logic or for semantics. And because of the context dependence of the use of language in law (see section 2.2), some have argued that indeterminacies in law are not significantly related to the susceptibility of statements of law to sorites reasoning (Lanius 2019, Chapter 3). Yet statements of law that use abstract expressions, and use them to different effect in different contexts, certainly are vague in the philosophers’ sense: that is, they appear to be susceptible to sorites reasoning. ‘Careless driving’ in its legal sense is a much more complex concept than ‘driving with bald tires’, and driving with bald tires is an instance of careless driving only in virtue of the evaluative and contextual considerations that must be understood if the law of careless driving is to be understood. Yet ‘careless driving’ is susceptible to sorites reasoning: e.g., those evaluative and contextual considerations give reason to conclude that it is careless to drive with bald tires. For all their complexity (and their relation to deep questions of the rights of the citizen and the responsibilities and the liabilities that a community can justifiably impose on the citizen), those considerations do not determine a standard that is more precise than a standard that could be expressed using such an ordinary vague expression as ‘bald’. That is, those considerations do not provide a way of distinguishing between one tire in the sorites series and the next. Similarly, it is obviously possible to construct sorites series for the application of even more abstract legal standards such as the right to due process, or the United States constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. These evaluative tests have special legal meanings that can only be understood in the context of a legal system, and in the more particular context of a specific area of law, and by reference to their elaboration and development in a common law system of precedent. Even with a mastery of all those aspects of the context, however, the best theory of the effect of such standards will not provide a way of distinguishing between one tire in the sorites series and the next. A theory of careless driving in some particular legal system at a particular time would be a defective theory, if it yielded the conclusion that the loss of one molecule of rubber from a tire can make the difference between driving that is careless and driving that is not careless according to law.