The Citation of Overseas Authority in Rights Litigation in New Zealand: How Much Bark? How Much Bite?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are no hard and fast rules governing the use of foreign precedents in litigation under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Indeed, there are no rules at all. New Zealand courts are in a similar position to courts in most countries with bills of rights in this regard. They are bound to consider relevant domestic authority, but appear to have unlimited discretion in regard to invoking foreign authority. They may cite Canadian, American, European, even South African authority in some cases only to ignore it in others. The authors review the use of foreign authority in New Zealand courts by examining citation practice in cases decided from 1990-2006, and use the data to answer a number of questions. For example, which rights tend to receive international treatment, and which do not? Which foreign courts are most likely to be cited in New Zealand courts? Is the citation of foreign decisions linked to expansive application of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, or does it have the effect of limiting its scope? The authors conclude that New Zealand courts should be more sceptical of foreign authority than they appear to be, and that the premises justifying its use should be articulated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".