Charter Creep: Creeping Precommitment and the Threat to Liberal Republicanism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract.At the heart of constitutionalism lies a fundamental flaw, what Stephen Holmes calls the paradox of democracy. On one hand precommitment—the constitutional entrenchment of certain fundamental rules and values—represents a restriction upon the ability of otherwise self-governing citizens to govern themselves. On the other, absent precommitment, self-governance becomes a precarious proposition. In this article I distinguish between “good” precommitment, whereby values to be protected are generally considered to be more prized than the short-term values that threaten them, and “bad,” precommitment to values in the absence of general and ordinal preferences. Specifically, I examine judicially mandated,creepingprecommitment in the context of abortion and free speech rights in Canada. Résumé.Il y a au cœur du constitutionnalisme un défaut fondamental, ce que Stephen Holmes appelle le paradoxe de la démocratie. D'une part, le préengagement (precommitment) – la constitutionnalisation de certaines règles et valeurs morales fondamentales – représente une contrainte limitant la capacité des citoyens autrement autonomes à se gouverner eux-mêmes. D'autre part, sans cet engagement préalable, l'autonomie devient une proposition précaire. Dans cet article, je fais la distinction entre le «bon» préengagement, portant sur des valeurs morales à protéger qui sont généralement considérées comme étant plus précieuses que les valeurs à court terme qui les menacent, et le «mauvais» préengagement, portant sur des valeurs morales non tranchées par des préférences générales et ordinales. J'examinerai spécifiquement le préengagementrampant, judiciairement autorisé, dans le contexte des droits à l'avortement et à la liberté d'expression au Canada.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".