Overexploitation of a Valuable Resource? New Literature on the Precautionary Principle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The precautionary principle in international law has attracted intense and sustained attention in the last ten to 15 years. It is thus becoming increasingly difficult for authors to make meaningful contributions in this area. Nevertheless, there remain a number of important research questions to be explored or further developed. In this review essay, the author considers four recent works on precaution and examines the extent to which they are able to break new ground in this crowded field. Four themes are taken up. First is the question whether precaution has become a rule of customary international law, which, the author suggests, does not require further sustained academic attention at this time. Second, the impact of precaution on the relationship between science and law is considered. Third, the limits of precaution are explored. Given the extraordinarily high expectations that many jurists have of this principle, consideration of the appropriateness of these expectations seems timely. Finally, the doctrinal implications of precaution are taken up. Despite the attention that jurists have bestowed upon the principle, the identification of these implications remains an elusive goal.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 teacher head, 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".