Principled Expediency: How the Irish Courts Can Compromise on Same-Sex Marriage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As lawyers, we like to think of law as being rather different from politics – as having brighter lines and a more principled approach to the resolution of problems. However, the line between constitutional law and politics is a thin one, particularly in those landmark controversies that constitutional courts are called on to resolve from time to time. When society is divided on the scope or even the existence of a right, judges called upon to adjudicate on the controversy need to be more than good lawyers; they need to have a keen political awareness as well. This connection between constitutional adjudication and the prevailing political climate was a prominent theme of the work of the celebrated constitutional theorist, Alexander Bickel. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential application of Bickel’s work to a classic example of a political controversy that has become a matter of constitutional litigation: same-sex marriage. In 2006, the Irish High Court upheld the Revenue Commissioner’s refusal to recognise Katherine Zappone and Ann Louise Gilligan’s Canadian marriage. A much delayed Supreme Court appeal was eventually abandoned, but a fresh challenge on different grounds is due to recommence in the High Court. In the meantime, various legal and political circumstances have changed. It will be argued that the High Court can do a better job the second time around, and that a solution is available that balances principle with expedient compromise in a way that could provide some satisfaction to both sides of the debate and encourage a political rather than a legal resolution of the issue.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.004 |
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".