Mixed Blessings: The Great Lakes Compact and Agreement, the IJC, and International Dispute Resolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For scholars of international law and international dispute resolution, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact and Agreement may seem a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they promise environmental cooperation and management of the Great Lakes at an unprecedented scale. The agreements have been heralded as a tremendous advancement in state-provincial relations. On the other hand, international scholars should be nervous for what the agreements signify for international law and dispute resolution. The Compact and Agreement are remarkable for replacing an already functioning regulatory regime: the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty, administered by the International Joint Commission.\nThis Article does not criticize the agreements, but it does lament the reluctance of the two countries to more readily embrace the International Joint Commission, and the powers granted to it under the Boundary Waters Treaty. The Compact and Agreement move transboundary environmental management and dispute resolution from the international to the subnational level. By doing so, they likely will further curtail the two countries' use of the IJC. At the very least, the agreements reflect a missed opportunity to reinvigorate, rather than undermine, the IJC. If the IJC has been only marginally effective recently, its shortcomings are a result of U.S. and Canadian national policy. The federal governments have been reluctant to embrace the IJC as an effective bilateral institution. It did not have to be this way. The result, this Article concludes, is unfortunate.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".