The Sub Judice Convention: What to Do When a Matter Is 'Before the Courts'
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The sub judice convention is a constraint imposed by Parliament on itself to ensure a reasonable balance between free speech for parliamentarians and fair trials for accused persons. In this article the author argues that the sub judice convention is commonly misunderstood. Many believe the rule is “you can’t talk about any matter that is before the courts.” This article argues that is too broad an interpretation. When used in this way, the sub judice convention has a tendency to suppress parliamentary debate, even when there is not the remotest possibility that the fairness of a trial will be impaired. The author gives a number of examples of the proper and improper use of the convention and calls for a more balanced approach to reconciling free speech and fair trials.
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 | 0.049 | 0.107 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
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".