Bibliographic record
Abstract
Constitutional argument based on unwritten norms is much in vogue these days, in large part because of the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Secession Reference. In that judgment, the Court departed in several important respects from the normal way in which constitutional cases in Canada are adjudicated. The Court stated that the Constitution consisted of both written and unwritten legal rules or principles. It also argued that those unwritten principles were fundamental or foundational, inasmuch as the text merely implemented them or actualized them, and that those principles could be used to fill gaps in the constitutional text through a process of amendment-like interpretation. The Secession Reference has spawned a cascade of constitutional cases across the country. This article surveys these cases and makes three points. First, it is easy to exaggerate both the volume and significance of this case-law. Second, unwritten constitutionalism is potentially very dangerous. Third, in the face of open-textured or ambiguous constitutional provisions in constitutional texts that require courts to make difficult choices, we can expect courts to interpret them openly and transparently in accordance with underlying political theories.
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 | 0.005 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".