For example, a statute that says "No person may smoke in a hospital" does not mean that "John Doe may not smoke in a hospital"; the second statement is the law only if a legitimate authority declares so.
This is because one cannot describe a legal statement as right or wrong without making a normative value judgment about what the law should be.
[clarification needed] In the 1990s the indeterminacy thesis came under heavy attack by liberal and conservative defenders of the rule of law, and the debate, though its mantle is in the process of being taken up by a new generation of scholars, has left the intellectual spotlight for the time being.
The thesis can be criticised because the concept of legal mistake is recognised in a determinative theory of law.
A positivist Hartian theory contends that this judgment is conventionally objective, because the rule of recognition fails to recognise the mistake as legally valid.