Vagueness, Finiteness, and the Limits of Interpretation and Construction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction The most important questions that arise in judicial review under bills of rights typically involve the most vaguely worded rights. Rights to “equal protection” and “due process” in the U.S. Bill of Rights and to “equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination” and “fundamental justice” in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms raise profoundly difficult moral and political questions, and the way in which they are interpreted by the courts has far-reaching consequences in the constitutional order. Given the stakes, concern about the legitimacy of particular approaches to constitutional interpretation is inevitable and it will not do to insist that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.” The question is not whether the judiciary must interpret the constitution but how it should do it. “New” originalist theory addresses the challenge posed by vaguely worded rights by emphasizing a distinction between “interpretation” and “construction.” Interpretation is concerned with determining the linguistic meaning of the text of the bill of rights and is the first task for a court. Once meaning is ascertained the court turns to the task of construction, developing secondary rules or doctrines to flesh out the content of vaguely worded rights in order to resolve particular disputes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.022 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.119 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".