Constitutional Rights Coming Home to Roost? Rights Internationalism in American Courts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is increasing pressure for American courts to accept the decisions of foreign courts and international tribunals as relevant, if not persuasive, authority in interpreting the US Bill of Rights. American courts are accused of being old-fashioned, if not parochial, and of failing to understand and respect international human rights norms. The authors suggest that American courts should be more wary than most when it comes to the decisions of foreign courts and international tribunals. These bodies speak the same language of rights, but they have different understandings of what rights are and how particular rights are to be understood. In addition, many countries have different conceptions of the state and its role, and the role of the courts. The very basics of American constitutionalism are, in significant ways, foreign to many of the countries that have adopted bills of rights. The authors discuss human rights jurisprudence in other countries with bills of rights and under international law, highlighting the features that distinguish that jurisprudence from American law. They consider the leading arguments used to justify the practice of judicial review under bills of rights, and indicate which of those arguments are applicable when the decisions of foreign courts and international tribunals are raised or in some sense relied upon by American courts. Finally, the authors review recent case law from Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, suggesting what might lie in store if rights internationalism becomes commonplace in American courts. They argue that there is a noticeable ratcheting-up effect in the rights-based jurisprudence of these common law systems as each draws on the most expansive case law of the others.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".