International and Domestic Selective Adaptation: The Case of Charter 08
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Legal transfers can be understood as involving complex processes by which particular understandings about legal phenomena are exchanged across distance and time. The theory of offers important opportunities for understanding legal transfers through its attention to the relationship between acceptance of doctrinal standards and assimilation of underlying norms. The dissident human rights document recently circulated in China under the title 'Charter 08' is an exercise of both international and sub-national adaptation.In the first part of this chapter the author examines the basic contours of Charter 08, reflecting on the ways in which this radical call for Chinese political and legal reform applies norms of liberalism to Chinese legal and political orthodoxies. In the second part, he offers an interpretation of Charter 08 framed by reference to the theory of selective adaptation, which posits that normative perspectives have a significant influence on local interpretation and implementation of international legal texts and standards. More particularly, the author explains how the theory of selective adaptation identifies perception, complementarity (between local and international practices and values) and legitimacy (the extent to which interpretative and local communities accept the aims and impacts of a transfer) as factors that enable an analysis of a transfer’s prospects of assimilation. This analysis challenges assumptions about the convergence of legal systems across normative divides. While Charter 08 draws upon principles of law and governance found in international discourse of liberalism, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Charter is its authors' reliance on established policy discourses of the Chinese Party-state as the basis for principles and policies of reform. Thus, Charter 08 reveals the phenomenon of selective adaptation in both the international and sub-national context. This chapter will examine these aspects of Charter 08, with particular attention given to selective adaptation's elements of perception, complementarity and legitimacy. It will offer a case study of the normative dimensions of legal transfers in a human rights context.
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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| 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".