Principles of South African Constitutional Law, Bernard Bekink : book review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bekink's Principles of South African Constitutional Law is an ambitious book with a CD. It spans 580 pages and a wide range of topics. The effort of writing a book with such a broad scope and the significant amount of research invested in the writing process must be recognized. The book makes a significant contribution to the literature on South African constitutional law. There are currently only a handful of books devoted to the constitution (and which can serve as constitutional law textbooks) leaving a wide gap in the market for more books of this kind. In light of the special status of constitutional law in our constitutional democracy and in light of our principle of constitutional supremacy, there is a dearth of serious academic books on South African constitutional law. There is as yet no South African equivalent of the masterful works by Tribe (American Constitutional Law (2000)) or Hogg (Constitutional Law of Canada (2007)), a fact left unchanged by Bekink's entry into this market. In the twenty years since the drafting of the new constitution, the constitutional court has decided more than 400 cases. This growing and substantial body of jurisprudence calls for academic scrutiny and analysis. Bekink's book partially, but only partially, succeeds in achieving this.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.005 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".