Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary There are no universally applicable procedural standards under international law for independence referenda. However, in contemporary comparative practice, a minimum requirement has emerged for clarity of both the winning majority and the referendum question. This article demonstrates that Scotland could become an independent state with the lowest popular support in recent international practice, yet this outcome would not compromise the legitimacy of the vote. Even the referendum question is an exemplar of textual clarity. However, the possibility of a referendum on the United Kingdom’s (UK) exit from the European Union (EU) complicates the matter. The author argues that, with independence, Scotland would, prima facie, also exit the EU, unless negotiated otherwise. However, with a potential referendum on the UK’s EU membership on the horizon, Scots do not know whether a vote to remain within the UK is also a vote to remain within the EU. Given the complexity and significance of the EU legal order, Scots have a right to know whether, at least in the near future, the alternative to independence is the UK within or outside the EU. If the two referenda fall too close to each other, the clarity of the Scottish independence referendum could be unduly compromised.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".