The Primacy of Liberty and Proportionality, Not Human Dignity, When Subjecting Criminal Law to Constitutional Control
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This comment argues that courts should focus on the negative liberty interests of the accused and the proportionality of state-imposed limits on those interests, as opposed to the human dignity of either the accused or the victim, when determining the constitutionality of criminal laws. The first part of the comment examines the Canadian experience with regard to the constitutional control of the criminal law. Canadian courts have focused on the liberty of the accused but have been unwilling to consider how the liberty interests of the accused can be subject to proportionate limitations. The next part suggests that human dignity has a dual character that can both support and oppose many controversial parts of the criminal law and as such is not particularly helpful for courts in assessing the constitutionality of criminal laws. The third part critically examines the presumptions of constitutionality proposed by Gur-Arye and Weigend and suggests that human dignity has little work to do in these presumptions. The last part suggests that a focus on the negative liberty of the accused and the proportionality of the state's limits on those rights provides the best foundation for constitutional control of the criminal law.
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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 | 0.018 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".