Is There Ever a ‘Right to One's Own Law’? An Exploration of Possible Rights Foundations for Legal Pluralism
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the possibility of elaborating a strong rights foundation for ‘weak’ legal pluralist arrangements, consisting of the recognition by the state of a degree of autonomy for the legal practices of minorities. It finds unhelpful and reductionist those arguments based merely on whether certain aspects of minority law are in violation of human rights or are more effective at protecting rights than state law. Instead, the article seeks to tackle the central issue of whether there is more generally a human rights case for legal pluralism, despite the modern rights movement's strong historical association with state monism and egalitarian universalism. Traditional rights bases for minority protection, both group and individual based, are envisaged specifically from the point of view of recognition of minority legal traditions. Both are found to raise difficulties that are magnified by the entry into play of legal considerations. When it comes to collective rights, there is a fear that endowing certain communities with legal autonomy will increase their ability to oppress the minority within; when it comes to individual rights, the idea of a ‘right to one's law’ misses the degree to which law is an institutional construct which requires a new division of power within the state that goes far beyond what are generally understood as basic freedoms. Rather than assessing the problem merely from an individual or group point of view, the rights validity of legal pluralist arrangements is seen as dependent on how they relate to society at large. Specifically, a case is made that legal pluralism can be part of a beneficial coming to terms by societies with their diversity, a reinforcement of democratic forms and, in some cases, a type of transitional justice that recognises the extent to which the deprivation of law has been a traditional means of subjugation of minorities. The article concludes with an effort to recast the entire debate from the point of view of international human rights law and to critique its somewhat arbitrary focus on the state as the only locus of significant legal diversity.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it