The Constitution of Agreement: A Brief Look at Sub-Federal Cross-Border Cooperation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The question addressed in this Essay was prompted by the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact and the companion Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Sustainable Water Resources Agreement. These instruments, taken together, purport to establish a regulatory regime that spans eight states of the United States and two provinces of Canada. The proposed compact is a formal covenant between the participating states and was designed to receive congressional approval under the Compact Clause of the United States Constitution. For its part, the Agreement is a mirror instrument, generally described as a good faith or handshake agreement, to which the states and provinces are parties. It is the prospect of the proposed compact not receiving congressional consent as well as the status of the obligations undertaken under the Agreement that have raised the specific question addressed in this Essay: what is the legal status of sub-federal cross-border agreements? A satisfactory answer to this question calls for extensive research beyond the scope of this Essay whose modest objective is to simply flag the issues that need closer attention.
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 | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| 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".