Legal Transplants or Legal Patchworking? The Creation of International Criminal Law as a Pluralistic Body of Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since ICL is considered to be a branch of public international law, it has been born out of the same institutional framework that governs law-making and law-applying in this traditionally inter-state playing field, yet because it deals with individual criminal responsibility, its normative content is drawn from domestic criminal law systems. Inter-systemic "borrowing" has occurred for centuries as a process of law reform, whereby domestic systems look to foreign jurisdictions for solutions to shared legal problems. The comparative law notion of legal transplants is therefore a useful analytical tool in ICL, however in the case of this nascent branch of international law, it is not so much a question of law reform, but of law creation. There is much to be learned from comparative law methodology and the scholarship on legal transplants, however the process of creating an entire system of law could perhaps better be described as legal patchworking. An inevitable pluralism emerges as multiple decision makers in multiple decision-making forums, both international and domestic, patchwork together various notions and norms drawn from other pre-existing systems. It would appear that international criminal lawyers need to consider themselves not only specialists in a new field, but also both comparativists and legal pluralists. The very nature of our field demands a multi-focal perspective. In order to minimize the risk of myopia, therefore, this paper deals with the question at hand: in what way can scholarship on legal transplants and legal pluralism amongst domestic legal systems offer some guidance on ensuring transplanting and patchworking in ICL are as successful as possible?
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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 | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.101 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.040 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".