The Political Origins of Judicial Empowerment through Constitutionalization: Lessons from Four Constitutional Revolutions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing upon an analysis of the political vectors behind constitutional reform in Israel (1992), Canada (1982) New Zealand (1990), and South Africa (1993), the article suggests that the trend toward constitutionalization in culturally divided polities has not been adequately delineated by extant theories of constitutional transformation. An examination of the political origins of these four constitutional revolutions suggests that judicial empowerment is in many cases the consequence of a conscious strategy undertaken by threatened political and economic elites seeking to preserve their hegemony vis-a-vis the growing influence of “peripheral” groups in crucial majoritarian policymaking arenas. In response to perceived threats by peripheral groups, elites who possess disproportionate access to and influence upon the legal arena often initiate a constitutional entrenchment of rights in order to insulate policymaking from popular political pressure. Power is transferred from majoritarian decision-making arenas to national high courts, where they assume their policy preferences will find greater support. This process of conscious judicial empowerment is likely to occur (a) when the judiciary's public reputation for political impartiality and rectitude is relatively high and (b) when the courts are likely to rule, by and large, in accordance with the cultural propensities and policy preferences of the traditionally hegemonic elites.
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 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".